Leave the World Behind author Rumaan Alam: ‘The authors I’ve read the most are like my own private university’

Rumaan Alam’s debut novel Leave the World Behind, an eerie thriller full of contemporary social and political anxieties, was one of the breakout literary hits of lockdown. A perfect “read in one sitting” book, it told the story of a family who leave the city for a nice quiet break in a rented house outside of the city… until a couple, who say they are the homeowners, turn up on the doorstep in need of shelter. In a very holiday-ruining turn of events, the city has lost power and things are all getting a bit apocalyptic. It wasn’t long before the novel was snapped up for a film adaptation, with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company bringing it to the screen with an all-star cast including Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali. The film went on to become one of the streamer’s biggest hits of the year.

Now Alam returns with his second novel, Entitlement, in which a woman in her thirties works as the assistant to an eighty-year-old billionaire. Her job, primarily, is to give away his fortune, and the book explores questions of wealth and morality. Here he shares some of the books that have meant the most to him…

I don’t have a pile, as such, but two bookcases in my office dedicated to everything I’ve yet to but want to read. They are full, indeed, they are overflowing, but I have at least alphabetised them, so create some illusion of order.

I never think “best” is applicable with art; all apples and oranges, isn’t it? I’ve read so many wonderful novels this year: new ones, like Julia Phillips’ Bear or Miranda July’s All Fours, classics like Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude or John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Comparing these or the many other books I’ve loved this year — Don DeLillo’s The Names, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women — would be pointless.

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, was a book I loved so dearly as a child that I would re-read it constantly. Even as an adult, I try to read it every couple of years. It takes a certain kind of genius to write for children, and I am so grateful to Fitzhugh and writers like Judy Blume for showing me just what I wanted to do with my life.

When my older son was in the second grade, he wrote a biography of a man named Cal Flanigan, a Black pilot who flew for Delta Airlines for 45 years. Even as a teen, my kid still loves nothing more than getting on an airplane, and this “book” – it’s bound in cardboard – is my most treasured.

One reliable surprise is reading (or rereading) the classics. When I was younger, I had the idea that books from a century ago had nothing to tell me. Now, I understand how wrong I was.

I’m constantly reading in search of education, some trick I think other writers possess that will reveal itself to me if I immerse myself in their work. Thus, I can only point to the authors with whom I’ve spent the most time: Kazuo Ishiguro, Patrick Modiano, Anita Brookner, Lorrie Moore, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich – my own private university, one hell of a faculty.

Summers, I love to read sprawled on the beach, but the place I reliably read every single day is bed; I can’t fall asleep unless I’ve read at least a page or two.

I hope it lies ahead of me, yet; I couldn’t bear to think that it was something that has already slipped by, unacknowledged by me.

I think it a profound gift to have a reader at all. When someone has given my work their time, that means more to me than what they might say – no matter how kind or hurtful their words might be!

Another impossible question, but I have a soft spot for used bookstores, the sort that are chaotically disorganised, with piles of volumes on the floor, where there is the soft sound of a radio playing in a back office, and an indifferent staff who will let you poke around for hours, lost in your own treasure hunt.

This gets us back to the apples and oranges territory, doesn’t it? But I don’t think a book is necessarily a “better” thing than a film – and I can indeed think of film adaptations I have quite liked, even a couple that perhaps improve on their source material. But as someone who writes books I can admit a bias toward books, generally.

‘Entitlement’ by Rumaan Alam is out now, published by Bloomsbury