A middle-class white person, in this country, has been trained her entire life, by every cultural product she has consumed, to be suspicious of blackness, particularly of black masculinity.

At the same time, I hope there’s something recognisable there. The register when the characters first meet is close to satire, and it allows you to go a little bigger and say these unpalatable things. There’s a gulf between what your characters think and what they say out loud, particularly when it comes to racism – as we see in the scene where Amanda, who is white, reacts to the unexpected arrival at their holiday rental of its black owners, GH and Ruth. The people I’m talking about are the person I am I’m a middle-class person living in New York City. I’ve trained myself to become reliant on this ancillary brain that I carry around in my pocket, as we all have. I cook a lot but there are certain basic components of recipes that I constantly forget and have to look up. Your characters are painfully aware of how ill-equipped they are to deal with societal collapse. People are thinking and talking about this stuff so it makes sense that there will be books about it. I think it’s connected to other books that are talking about some of the same things – about the individual relationship to anxiety over the climate, the absurdity of the contemporary moment, our warped relationship to technology. On a very basic level, the book dramatises being trapped in at home and not having enough information – and it happened to be published into a reality in which many readers felt that they were trapped in their homes and didn’t have enough information. I’d never even heard the word coronavirus prior to February 2020.

Alam lives in Brooklyn with his husband, David Land, a photographer, and their two adopted sons.Ī lot of reviewers called your book “prescient”, given that you wrote it before the pandemic. Now out in paperback, it is being turned into a film by Sam Esmail ( Mr Robot) starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. The story of two families, one white, one black, thrust together in a Long Island holiday home amid apocalyptic events, it was described by the Observer as “simply breathtaking… as terrifying and prescient as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”.

He is the author of three novels, the latest of which, Leave the World Behind, got rave reviews when it came out in hardback last year. R umaan Alam was born in 1977 and raised in Washington DC.

Rumaan alam