Entitlement

Rumaan Alam is the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother and Leave the World Behind, which was an international bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orwell Prize, and adapted for a major motion picture in 2023 starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali. Alam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Bookforum and New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

Alam is scathingly funny ... Entitlement invites comparison to Edith Warton’s House of Mirth and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar ... Books of this calibre transcend personal experience. I barrelled through – propelled by its wit and unshakeable dread – and promptly read it again. Only then could I luxuriate in its tautness. Mundane conversations distil into dazzling singsong and the whole is expertly held together by its narrator’s sly interjections. Its stylishness belies discipline, for not a word is wasted. Like New York, it will linger despite its apparently cavalier air