Rich and Pretty: A Novel

Named a Best Book of 2016 by Esquire, Refinery29, and Nylon
One of Bustle’s 17 Of 2016’s Most Anticipated Books To Put On Your Wishlist Immediately
One of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Titles to Watch in Summer Fiction 
An Amazon Editors’ Beach Reads pick
One of Newsday’s Best Summer Books 2016
One of PopSugar’s 31 Books You MUST Put in your Beach Bag
A Miami Herald summer reads pick
This irresistible debut, set in contemporary New York, provides a sharp, insightful look into how the relationship between two best friends changes when they are no longer coming of age but learning how to live adult lives.
As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.
Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren—beautiful, independent, and unpredictable—is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself. Each woman envies—and is horrified by—particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.
Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection—or just force of habit—that keeps them together?
With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives—and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge.

Literature & Fiction

Alam, Rumaan

United States

Ecco

“A sparkling debut.” (People) “The perfect summer read... pitch perfect and wise” (Elle)
“Smart, sharp, and beautifully made, Rumaan Alam’s portrait of two childhood best friends transitioning into their adult lives is vividly rendered, set against a tantalizing background of moneyed New York City that is impossible to resist.” (Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers)
As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.
Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren—beautiful, independent, and unpredictable—is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself. Each woman envies—and is horrified by—particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.
Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection—or just force of habit—that keeps them together?
With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives—and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge.

NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY: Buzzfeed • The Boston Globe • The Millions • InStyle • Southern Living • Vogue • Popsugar • Kirkus • The Washington Post • Library Journal • Real Simple • NPR
“With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam’s second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking.” — Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
From the celebrated author of Rich and Pretty, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep
Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help—Priscilla Johnson—and begs her to come home with them as her son’s nanny.
 Priscilla’s presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca’s perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.
 Written with the warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the lives we choose, and the lives that are chosen for us.

That Kind of Mother: A Novel

A Read with Jenna&nbsp;Today&nbsp;Show Book Club Pick! Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction) One of Barack Obama's Summer Favorites A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time *&nbsp;NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. From the bestselling author of&nbsp;Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class.&nbsp;Leave the World Behind&nbsp;explores how our closest bonds are reshaped--and unexpected new ones are forged--in moments of crisis. Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation:&nbsp;a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple--it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area--with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service--it's hard to know what to believe. Should Amanda and Clay trust this&nbsp;couple--and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?&nbsp;

Leave the World Behind: A Novel

Product Description 
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! 
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction) 
A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe 
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. 
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis. 
Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe. 
Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other? 
 Review 
“A slippery and duplicitous marvel of a novel…. 
Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: Its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now. That's more than enough to make it a signature novel for this blasted year.” -- Fresh Air (NPR)\n"'Leave the World Behind' is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature." -- 
Washington Post\n“The best book you can read right now . . . A perfectly-engineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, 
Leave the World Behind combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments. . . An exceptional read that will stay with you long after you’ve sped through its final pages.” -- 
USA Today\n" 
Leave the World Behind is so many things—funny, sharp, insightful about modernity and race and parenthood and home—but at its core it’s a story of our shared apocalypse; a steady look at humanity in the moment it tumbles from a great height. I have not been this profoundly unnerved by a science fiction novel since Ishiguro’s 
 Never Let Me Go." 
 -- Carmen Maria Machado, author of 
Her Body and Other Parties\n" 
Leave The World Behind is that rarest of things, a beautifully written, emotionally resonant page-turner. Alam explores complex ideas about privilege and fate with miraculous wit and grace." -- Jenny Offill, author of 
Weather\n"Rumaan Alam's 
Leave the World Behind is the fall's biggest novel." -- 
Entertainment Weekly\n“If there’s one book that will haunt you in 2020, it’s this one….Equal parts literary fiction and suspense, 
Leave the World Behind is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and disturbing look at both the precarious state of world affairs as well as class and race relations. In a year when anything — including the apocalypse — feels possible, this novel offers a realistic glimpse of how the world as we know it could end, and it will leave you reeling.” -- Buzzfeed\n“Rarely have I encountered a book so cuttingly prescient about the current emo

Harper Large Print

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! 
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction) 
One of Barack Obama's Summer Reads 
A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe 
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong. 
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis. 
Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe. 
Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?

EccoPress

Leave the World Behind [Movie Tie-in]: A Novel

Jettison the old rulebooks about home décor and “undecorate” your space. As the founder and creative director of DwellStudio—which is famous for its brightly colored, graphic textile designs for home furnishings—designer Christiane Lemieux challenges tradition in a quintessentially American way, championing a fresh, unconventional approach to creating a beautiful and comfortable home. Lemieux emboldens readers to push aside stuffy, professionally-designed décor, showing them instead how to infuse their own personality into their home. Undecorate profiles twenty homes from all over the country, revealing their owners’ love of imperfection and penchant for surprise and unusual juxtapositions while inspiring readers to follow their own whimsy and practicalities in their personal spaces. An anglophile creates an English manor in Hollywood, mixing British flea-market finds with midcentury furniture. A car fanatic turns a vintage Airstream trailer into a master bedroom and situates it in the middle of a vast industrial loft in downtown Chicago. A couple transforms a log house in Nashville, Tennessee, by blending their modern and eclectic styles with the home’s rustic charm. Though the designs differ widely, the spaces all express an open-minded attitude. Some homes embrace their contexts, while others transcend them. All are shaped by instinct and imagination and share innovative ideas that readers can use to organically and elegantly create their home to match their lifestyle and tastes. Lemieux gets to the essence of the homeowners’ distinctive styles, pinpointing the transformative ideas, thoughtful details, and useful solutions that make each home memorable. With more than 200 full-color photographs, Undecorate will both inspire and guide homeowners to a new outlook on home design.

Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design

Religion & Spirituality

LeMieux, Christiane

Other Eastern Religions & Sacred Texts

Potter Style

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alam, Rumaan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alam, Rumaan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alam, Rumaan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rich and Pretty: A Novel

Rich and Pretty: A Novel

That Kind of Mother: A Novel

That Kind of Mother: A Novel

Leave the World Behind: A Novel

Leave the World Behind: A Novel

That Kind of Mother: A Novel

Leave the World Behind: A Novel

Leave the World Behind [Movie Tie-in]: A Novel

Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design