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Spoilers ahead.

Leave the World Behind is the latest apocalyptic thriller to come out of Netflix, and the sci-fi angle and stacked cast made the film an instant hit with fans. The movie follows Amanda and Clay Sandford, a couple that decides to rent a house and vacation on Long Island with their two teen children, Archie and Rose. Their vacation is soon interrupted when George and Ruth Scott, the owners of the abode, come back to the house and state that there’s been some kind of nationwide blackout that will require them to stay with the Sandfords.

The movie is actually based on the book of the same name by Rumaan Alam, and it was one of the best-selling books of 2020, and a finalist for the National Book Award. The eerie and apocalyptic setting of the movie has prompted some viewers to wonder how closely it follows the events of the book, especially after screenplay writer and director Sam Esmail told Entertainment Weekly that he wanted to make a slightly different story

“It just became a different interpretation of what Rumaan wrote, just recontextualized into the cinematic form. I’m not a fan of making a carbon copy of the book.” Esmail said. “What I wanted was to create this standalone piece so that you could read the book and you could watch the movie and one wouldn’t spoil the other — that there were sort of two separate pieces and two different interpretations of the same story.”

Whether you’ve never read the book before or just want a recap about its plot and themes, here’s what you need to know about the Leave the World Behind novel.

What is the book Leave the World Behind about?

On the surface, Leave the World Behind just seems like it just focuses on the apocalyptic setting, but it also explores the themes of race, class, privilege, and our dependence on technology. The arrival of a Black couple, no matter how well-dressed or polished they seemed, immediately posed a threat to the Sanfords, a white family, but their suspicion eased ones they learned that the Washingtons were wealthy and successful. And while having a second home in the suburbs is a privilege, the fact remains that in the face of a worldwide disaster and blackout, money alone won’t save you.

And while the 2020 release of the book was circumstantial, the theme of having to retreat into one’s home, became even more pertinent in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The fact that I fixed on the metaphor of isolation and the device of people trapped in a house, without knowing that we, American readers, would all be people trapped in our houses, was just an accident of timing. But the novel is also grappling with things that I think have been in the cultural atmosphere for a long time,” Alam told The Paris Review. “It’s talking about technology and our strange dependence on it. It’s talking about race and the very complicated ways in which race defines people in our country and in our culture. These are not new ideas. These are things that have been in the air for a long time.”

The overlapping narration was also a conscious choice, as Alam wanted to replicate the feeling of several people talking over each other, especially in a situation as unprecedented as the one in the novel.

“One is that I love a trope of cinema in particular where people are speaking over one another. One person is saying one thing, that person is saying another thing. They don’t quite finish their thoughts. They shift the nature of the conversation…That is really fascinating to me, where you can’t always determine who is saying what or why they’re saying what,” Alam explained in an interview with Powell’s Books. It’s just something I love doing in books. I really enjoy that challenge as a reader. I think it approximates how reality works a little. There’s a lot of conversation in this book. In some ways, the reader inhabits the same space as the characters, this place of really not knowing what’s happening.”

The Leave the World Behind Book, Explained

In the Leave the World Behind book, Amanda Sanford decides to take her family — husband Clay and teens Rose and Archie — on an unplanned vacation in Long Island. One night, an older Black couple named George and Ruth Washington show up at the house, claiming to be owners of the home. The well-dressed pair say that they came to the house due to a blackout in New York City, and offer the family a partial refund for interrupting their vacation.

Amanda is suspicious of the couple, but Clay says they should let the couple stay. Soon after that, the wifi and TV service in the house go down.

The next day, Rose sees a horde of deer, and the weather is unseasonably hot. Clay decides to drive into town to see if he can figure out what’s going on, but he gets lost. Along the way, he finds a woman and tries to speak with her, but she only speaks Spanish. However, she seems afraid of something, so Clay apologizes and decides to leave her there.

Rose and Archie decide to explore the forest, where Archie unknowingly gets a tick bite. Other weird occurrences happen, like a thunderous sudden noise that echoes across the land, the disappearance of helicopters and planes, cracks in the glass door of the house, and the appearance of flamingos on the house’s lawn.

Archie soon falls sick with a fever, and then his teeth start falling out. Rose goes missing, so the adults decide that Clay and George will take Archie to the hospital while Amanda and Ruth stay behind to look for Rose. Clay comes clean about the woman that he met the previous day, and George says that the woman could have been their maid, Rosa. George also reveals that they never got to know their neighbors because they didn’t know how they might react to having Black people in the neighborhood. George does know one person that lives in the area, so they decided to stop at Danny’s place, as he is the Washingtons’ contractor. Unfortunately, George is cold to them, and doesn’t offer much help. The two men then decided not to take Archie to the hospital and return home. Elsewhere, a state of emergency has been declared in many states, there’s flooding, and the President of the United States is in a bunker. It then turns out that Rose is fine, but she had been back in the forest, walking to a house she had previously seen. She raids the house for supplies then heads back home as well.