Jude Cook

The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed

An ambitious young black woman working for a charitable trust clashes with its white octogenarian founder over what each thinks they deserve

Rumaan Alam. [Getty Images] 
issue 14 September 2024

Money can’t buy you love, the Beatles sang. But that doesn’t matter so much if you’re not interested in love, like Brooke Orr, the 33-year-old heroine of Rumaan Alam’s fourth novel, Entitlement. In contrast to Alam’s wildly successful, lockdown-resonant Leave the World Behind, the latest book is set in 2014, during the era of ‘Obama’s Placid America’, a world depicted as a virtually frictionless pre-Trump utopia in which ‘black, gorgeous, serious, passionate’ young women such as Brooke can thrive.

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