Although this family failed to disappear, their old selves are transmogrified: their story makes plain that The Rapture's effects extend beyond physical presence and absence. This is a story about love and loss, and about how people try to make sense of things that simply don't, set in a marvellously dystopian near-present. Kevin attempts to get on with his normal life, seeking to plug the emerging gaps in his life with a new relationship with a depressed woman whose entire family vapourised in The Rapture. Tom gets involved in a different cult, the Healing Hug movement, led by the charismatic (and criminally polygamist) Holy Wayne, which eventually leads to him going on the run with one of Wayne's wives disguised as Barefoot People (yet another cult, this time fans of free love and recreational drugs). Jill starts hanging out with some slightly delinquent youths, becomes promiscuous, starts taking drugs and stops trying at school, and invites one of her delinquent friends, Amy, to live with her and her father, Kevin.

Perrotta has something quite different in mind for them, however.Īfter Laurie's best friend joins a cult called The Guilty Remnants (whose members denounce their old lives, take a vow of silence, live communally and smoke continually to prove they aren't afraid of death), it isn't long before Laurie leaves her family and joins their number. One might expect this fairly ordinary family to cope relatively well, since they all survived perhaps it might even make them closer. There's Kevin, the town's mayor his wife Laurie their scholarly, hardworking teenage daughter Jill and their slightly estranged son Tom, who went to university and hasn't yet come back, or decided quite what he wants to do with his life.

This family - unlike so many others - were lucky enough to have avoided losing any of their number in what some people had begun to call The Rapture. The Leftovers focuses on telling the story of one family. This is the premise of The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta's sixth novel, which explores the various ways in which these ordinary people attempt to get on with their ordinary lives in an extraordinary world where nothing makes sense anymore. This is exactly what has happened to the residents of a small north American town called Mapleton, who have inexplicably survived an utterly inexplicable event where huge numbers of people simultaneously vanished into thin air. Imagine then, if you will, what it feels like to be a human leftover.

The leftovers perrotta