45 pages 1 hour read

Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Important Quotes

Quotation Mark Icon

“The people who owned this house were rich enough to be thoughtful.” 


(Chapter 2 , Page 9)

Class consciousness is one of the core tensions of the book, and Amanda’s noticing of how well-appointed and thoughtful everything is in the house underscores this coming conflict, especially as it becomes entangled with notions of race and Amanda’s own sense of liberal self-importance. Amanda wants access to this kind of life, but does not feel entirely comfortable in it.

Quotation Mark Icon

“Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.” 


(Chapter 4, Page 15)

This quote is a wry nod to America’s history of racist violence and a marker of Clay’s glib attitude toward the real impact of his smoking; he is willing to hint at subjugation and violence as a core part of American identity, but only in a way that undercuts it and makes him feel like he is thinking of it from a place of ironic distance.

Quotation Mark Icon

“Amanda had a novel she could barely follow, with a tiresome central metaphor involving birds.” 


(Chapter 6, Page 27)

Rumaan Alam takes a moment here to undercut his own book, which features a central metaphor involving birds. This can be read as either a meta moment of self-consciousness or an admission that literature will have to carve out a new kind of meaning-making in the face of apocalyptic living.