Alam brilliantly doubles down on this transgression, rendering the entire novel in a relay of close third-person perspectives, so that we are inside the head of each of the characters in turn. There’s a wonderful passage at a party in Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges where the characters move around the dancefloor, narrative perspective passing from one person to the next, breaking all the rules of the creative writing seminar. She speaks no English his Spanish is cursory. The next day Clay goes off in search of help but finds only a migrant worker sobbing by the roadside. GH and Ruth come bearing tales of strange happenings. These concerns, though, are about to be subsumed into a wider crisis. A canny black criminal could take advantage of that!” It’s no surprise that Netflix is working on an adaptation with Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts “It was a way of acknowledging that they didn’t believe all black people were criminals. “They let these people in because they were black,” Amanda thinks. There are strong echoes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as the reader is asked to join Amanda and Clay in ascertaining how threatening this couple are. GH and Ruth, it transpires, are the owners of the house, even though Amanda thinks to herself that it didn’t seem “like the sort of house where black people lived”.

A black couple – GH (George) Washington and his wife, Ruth, ask to come in. Then, one night, there’s a knock on the door. Amanda is in advertising, Clay teaches at City College and reviews for the New York Times – they are comfortable, in love, delighted by their children.

Amanda and Clay take their teenage children – Archie and Rose – away to a remote Long Island holiday house where they are able to “pantomime ownership” of the Vermont stone kitchen tops and night-lit swimming pool.

Alam is a writer of scrupulous precision, drawing the reader into the world of his characters through detailed inventories of the objects about them.

Leave the world behind rumaan alam