Netflix has purchased the worldwide distribution rights for a future film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s upcoming Kirkus-starred novel, Leave the World Behind, according to Deadline. The movie is set to co-star Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, and will be directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail; all three will co-produce. No prospective release date has yet been announced.
Alam’s hotly anticipated novel will be published on Oct. 6 by HarperCollins imprint Ecco Press, and it offers, as Kirkus’ review put it, “a dystopian fever dream cloaked in the trappings of a dream vacation”: White, middle-class advertising account manager Amanda takes her husband and two kids from Brooklyn to Long Island for a vacation at a rented summer house. Shortly after they get there, however, the house’s wealthy, Black owners, George and Ruth Washington, unexpectedly arrive; there’s been a blackout in New York City, and their Park Avenue apartment didn’t feel secure. Before long, everyone realizes that the city’s blackout is just the beginning of a greater, more mysterious calamity.
“Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters’ heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination,” noted Kirkus’ review. “The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers—disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time.”
The author’s previous novel, That Kind of Mother, also received the Kirkus Star and was named one of Kirkus’ Best Books of 2018.
Washington and Roberts last co-starred in a film more than two decades ago, in 1993’s The Pelican Brief; it was based on John Grisham’s Kirkus-starred 1992 thriller. In 2017, Roberts starred in another high-profile book adaptation: Wonder, based on the bestselling 2012 children’s novel by R.J. Palacio and directed by novelist Stephen Chbosky. She and Esmail most recently collaborated on the Golden Globe-nominated Amazon Prime Video series Homecoming, which premiered in late 2018.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
