BOOKS


Author Interview Rumaan Alam


Rumaan Alam explores race, family and complex power dynamics in his timely fourth novel


Madeleine Feeny @madeleinefeeny 18 12th July 2024


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oney has replaced faith as the guiding principle of contemporary life. It is the force that essentially drives everything,” says Rumaan Alam, the American author of the hit novel Leave the World Behind, his third novel, but his first to be published in the UK. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, selected as a Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month and a Barack Obama Summer Reading pick, and made into a film starring Julia Roberts. His fourth novel, Entitlement, is an elegant, disorienting drama about financial anxiet in middle-class New York, hinging on the charged relationship between a young Black woman, Brooke Orr, and her octogenarian white billionaire boss, Asher Jaffee. Animated by the same panic that fuelled its predecessor, albeit with a different catalyst, Entitlement likewise explores family, parenthood and race in a bourgeois milieu, infusing a tense narrative with sly humour.


© David A Land


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