Various cults have emerged, fanaticism flourishes, the president is trying to "Jump Start America", and the Garveys muddle along just like all the other wealthy families in Mapleton. Although none of their immediate family "vaporised" in the Sudden Departure, they are hit hard by its societal aftershocks. The family includes parents Laurie and Kevin, and their teenage children, Tom and Jill. Perrotta's novel is aimed once again at suburban life, namely the Garvey family in the town of Mapleton. There also weren't any bad guys to hate, which made everything that much harder to get into focus." but the media was never able to settle upon a single visual image to evoke the catastrophe. October 14th was more amorphous, harder to pin down: there were massive highway pileups, some train wrecks, numerous small-plane and helicopter crashes. "The coverage felt different from that of September 11, when the networks had shown the burning towers over and over. The atmosphere this event generates comes prepackaged with echoes of the mass grief felt in the US after the September 11 terrorist attacks - a fact Perrotta addresses: The departure occurs in the present day, on October 14 of an unnamed year, but as everyone soon realises "it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture" as anticipated by true believers. It's about a suburban family coping with life after a worldwide "Rapture-like phenomenon" called the Sudden Departure, in which millions of people disappeared instantly. The Leftovers is, then, already a hot property, with a ready-for-TV premise.
Now, The Leftovers is primed for bestseller status, thanks to an initial US print run of 300,000 copies, and news last month that Perrotta is adapting the book for a forthcoming HBO television series. He's made a name for himself with snarky, withering critiques of uptight suburban American life in a batch of highly successful novels, such as Election and Little Children, which were both adapted into films that received warm notices.
Perrotta punches at the Left Behind series at a time when his own franchise is flourishing. The book's title is meant to evoke the Left Behind series of best-selling books co-authored by Jerry B Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, books such as Soul Harvest and The Remnant, which launched a mega-franchise of movies and video games featuring a planet ruined after the End Times, or Rapture, in which devout Christians ascend to heaven and heathens are left behind to suffer in a world of grief, famine, war and economic collapse. Get the scoop on which of the latest titles are worth making part of your personal collection. After writing about religion in his previous novel The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta's latest book, The Leftovers, re-enters the territory of America's evangelical Christian right with satiric guns blazing.
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