Making friends, finding new people, connecting with the humans around us has been complicated and compromised by a virus that has completely and utterly overtaken the world. With all of these things comes worry and dread of the other. Do we work from home or live at work now? I can’t quite tell the difference anymore. Suddenly what brought us comfort feels cramped, small, and totally foreign to us. But the home has transformed into something else. One might argue, for many people around the world we are spending too much time at home. And I say this because we do not feel safe and homely. To borrow the German word from Freud, it feels unheimlich meaning in a direct translation ‘not homely’, rather than the English translation of uncanny. Published in October 2020, we were already in the full swing of a global pandemic and divisive U.S. Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind comes at a time of unrest, uncertainty, and fear.
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