Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet A student she used to be. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet by the name of Holy Wayne.

His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the streets of town as 'living reminders' of God's judgment.

Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family falls apart. The Leftovers is an apocalyptic novel for people who wouldn't be caught dead-or even Raptured-reading such a thing.A startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection, and loss from The New York Times bestselling author of The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children What if the Rapture happened and you got left behind? Or what if it wasn't the Rapture at all, but something murkier, a burst of mysterious, apparently random disappearances that shattered the world in a single moment, dividing history into Before and After, leaving no one unscathed? How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event? This is the question confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Perrotta, always a master chronicler of listless suburbia, has written an affecting, often funny story of people reeling from loss and searching for a future. Kevin Garvey, the newly elected mayor of Mapleton, strives for a return to normalcy even as his children become unmoored-his daughter, Jill, goes from model student to troubled teen, and his college-age son runs away to follow a crackpot 'healing prophet.' There are other, community-based post-Rapture changes as well, including the Guilty Remnant, a cult that sends silent, chain-smoking, white-wearing Watchers to patrol neighborhoods and remind survivors that 'the old world is gone.' Soon Kevin's wife joins the G.R., and he can only stumble forth into a relationship with a woman who's still grieving the sudden disappearance of her husband and children. Martin's) is less concerned with the inherent religious issues than with the lives of the suburbanites left behind.

October 14: The date of the Sudden Departure, or a 'Rapture-like phenomenon.' Millions of people around the world-dignitaries, celebrities ('the nerdy guy in the Verizon ads'), and regular folks-simply vanish.

The leftovers perrotta