On December 8th, 2023, Netflix will begin streaming the film adaptation of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam! The film will star Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Myha'la. You can watch the official trailer for the film here.
Excited about the film? Read (or reread) the novel in anticipation!
Leave the World Behind is a magnetic, suspenseful, and provocative novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. It's keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis.
We aren't the only fans of this novel, since its release in 2020, Leave the World Behind has received endless praise. Check out some of the love below:
“A slippery and duplicitous marvel of a novel...Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now. That's more than enough to make it a signature novel for this blasted year.”
—Fresh Air (NPR)
“'Leave the World Behind' is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature.”
—Washington Post
“The best book you can read right now...A perfectly-engineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, Leave the World Behind combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments...An exceptional read that will stay with you long after you’ve sped through its final pages.”
—USA Today
“Leave the World Behind is so many things—funny, sharp, insightful about modernity and race and parenthood and home—but at its core it’s a story of our shared apocalypse; a steady look at humanity in the moment it tumbles from a great height. I have not been this profoundly unnerved by a science fiction novel since Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
“Leave The World Behind is that rarest of things, a beautifully written, emotionally resonant page-turner. Alam explores complex ideas about privilege and fate with miraculous wit and grace.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Weather
In addition to the wonderful acclaim, Leave the World Behind was also A Read with Jenna Pick, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (fiction), and was featured on Barack Obama's Summer Favorites list.
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In October of 2020, the Library Love Fest team hosted Rumaan Alam on Door to Door, where he talked in depth about Leave The World Behind. Check it out here:
If you can't get enough of Leave the World Behind, listen to our interview with Rumaan on The Library Love Fest Podcast:
We know that you'll love Leave the World Behind as much as we did, so get your hands on a copy now. If you need us on Friday, we'll be busy watching the new film adaptation on Netflix!
—The Library Love Fest team
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