His parents moved there from Bangladesh in the ’70s in pursuit of higher education and a stable life. Like the protagonist of his second book, That Kind of Mother, he grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., “which is like growing up nowhere,” he says. The details of Alam’s life, both large and small, are hidden throughout his novels. “My work is autobiographical,” he told me the other day over vodkas-on-ice in his Brooklyn backyard. “This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived,” Alam writes of Amanda, the white woman immediately after, she wonders what she meant by that.Īs in his earlier books, Alam displays a gift for writing about wealthy white people, capturing white women in particular with cutting precision. When they ask to be let in, the uncomfortable prejudices lurking beneath the guests’ nice white liberal façade rise to the surface.

In the middle of the night, a wealthy Black couple show up, declare that they are the homeowners, and bring news of a mysterious apocalyptic event. An unsettling and seductive literary thriller, it begins with an upper-middle-class white family vacationing at a luxurious Airbnb in the Hamptons. Netflix has already snapped it up after a heated bidding war, with Sam Esmail directing and Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington set to star. The resulting book, Leave the World Behind, is poised to be one of the biggest titles of the fall.

The winter he left the Times, he secluded himself from his family in Brooklyn hotel rooms and poured his existential dread into his writing. This perception had partly shaped his first two novels, which he’d written from the perspectives of wealthy white women, a choice that felt to him like a quiet act of rebellion. They didn’t say it outright, but he sometimes felt their faces or tones betrayed that they found him interesting less because of anything he said or wrote than because of where his parents happened to be from. For as long as he had been a writer, Alam imagined that certain people, including editors and publishers, expected him to write about people he outwardly resembled. This thought had haunted his life as a novelist as well. Was he just not good enough to make it work? A troubling thought crept into his mind, one that had dogged him throughout his years working at prestigious New York media institutions: What if the Times had hired him not because it valued his mind but because it wanted to prove it cared about diversity? He was so disturbed by this possibility that he quit the job before the year was out. But a few months into his tenure, he began to feel he was failing.

It was a dream job - of course it was - and he pictured himself working at that hallowed institution for the rest of his career. A little more than two years ago, the novelist and critic Rumaan Alam landed a job as the editor of special projects at The New York Times Book Review.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam