“Entitlement” by Rumaan Alam

A seductive read about the murky world of wealth, morality, and self-discovery. Check out our Fall 2024 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Entitlement” by Rumaan Alam.

June 1, 2024

LARB Book Club is thrilled to announce our Summer 2024 Book Club title: Entitlement by Rumaan Alam! To join the LARB Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a Friend member today. The Fall Book Club Discussion will take place on October 16 at 6 p.m. PST. RSVP here.

¤

Prepare to be captivated by Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement, a novel diving into a seductive, murky world of wealth and self-discovery. We follow Brooke Orr, a dynamic woman handling a massive responsibility—managing an octogenarian billionaire’s earthly fortune and assisting him in giving it all away.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.

¤

“Rumaan Alam is one of my favorite writers and Entitlement held me spellbound from its evocative opening to its startling, audacious last pages.”—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and LARB Contributor

“Reading Entitlement felt like having a vise slowly tightened around my heart. With a luminous wit and an impeccable eye for detail, Alam has given us a rich, layered story of wealth and how it defines and distorts those who have it and those who aspire to it. Elegant, precise and devastating.”—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown and LARB Contributor

In the meantime, as we wait to sink our teeth into Alam’s new novel, check out Elena Sheppard’s review of Leave the World Behind and Alice Stephens on That Kind of Mother, novels that both explore the intricacies of morality and prejudice.

¤

Join our Book Club today to get Entitlement plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. Previous selections have included The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan, Molly by Blake Butler, and E. J. Koh’s The Liberators.