Library Book Group

June's selection is Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.

No registration, open to all.

Amanda and Craig and their children, Archie and Rose, hope to leave their troubles behind as they vacation in a remote Long Island cottage. But the world has a way of finding you. Barely a day into their vacation, the house’s owners come knocking. Panicked by a total blackout in Manhattan, where they usually reside, Ruth and G. H. are seeking refuge in their other home. As if to confirm the couple’s unease, unsettling events—flamingos flying in the woods, an earth-shattering noise invading the saturated summer silence—transpire. As they do, Alam brilliantly captures the shift in dynamics between the two families, from apprehension about each other to a collective front against an external entity. The narrative’s increasing tempo expertly dives into subtle yet incisive intersections between class and race, since the vacationers are white, and G. H. and Ruth are Black. Alam's novel lobs a series of unsettling questions: How will we react to the next nebulous horror? How will we parent? What will we define as home? “Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself,” thinks Rose. In a world constantly on edge, this will have to pass for consolation.

from Booklist, copyright American Library Association