The Leftovers
Ratings63
Average rating3.4
What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down?
That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened—not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.
Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin’s own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin’s teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet “A” student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he’s distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start. [from Amazon]
Tags
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Well this was an interesting pick to read at the beginning of quarantine! In the book, a host of people from one town just evaporate into thin air one day, leaving their loved ones to deal with the fall-out of immediate and widespread loss in a community. The book explores the aftermath as several people in the town form a cult of silence, total asceticism, but also a weird kind of pseudoterrorism that then looms over the rest of the community that are trying to continue their lives “normally.” It's an interesting meditation on existentialism and the ways we move through grief.
I was kind of stunned by how little of the show is present here except for a bare skeleton. I knew it would only roughly map onto the first season, but it's quite an illustration with hindsight about how much can be added through a writers room, I guess.
It's hard to ignore the coincidence of reading this three years after the beginning of our own mild apocalypse, albeit one that is more explicable than this one was. I got a vague feeling of the past (2011!) being truly a different country here, apocalypse or no.
