It’s a story about powerlessness, about scary times, about the illusion of control. Leave the World Behind is a striking, unsettling novel. Later on, when his characters feast on brie and chocolate sandwiches (“It’s a real thing!” he says), they’re using a recipe that came into Alam’s life by way of his own relatives. That scene, Alam says, is “so autobiographical”, reflective of his own shopping habits. A specific scene in which Amanda shops at a large supermarket escalates into a full-blown inventory of her grocery list.

Boxed cake becomes comfort on a rainy vacation day, recycled coffee filters a reflection of the mind of a somewhat conscious, middle-class New Yorker seeking to put her conscience at ease in the grocery aisle.

It might sound frivolous, but in his world, those things are anything but: food, he says, is a marker of class. “Do you think this president will do the right thing about it?” The novel’s nameless narrator muses in response: “This kind of thing used to sound like paranoia, but now it was just pragmatism.”Īlam’s keen sense of our time is also laid bare in his vivid descriptions of food and grocery purchases.

“Let’s say something happens in New York City,” GH Washington wonders at one point. I need to have music playing and a cup of tea and all of these things.’ But those ideal conditions don't really work, and you can't overthink that stuff.”Īlam’s characters share our contemporary world, with a 45th US president who “ to have dementia”. “People can pathologise their own process and they'll go, ‘I need to have absolute silence. Using the platform that way, with the constraint of the 280-character limit, was a liberating “psychological trick”.

This is an author who began workshopping Leave the World Behind on a private Twitter account, which helped him find the right voice for the book. But there’s also something electrifyingly modern about his work.

Review of leave the world behind