The Leftovers

Novelist Tom Perrotta co-created the show and co-wrote key episodes, so the novel isn't a distant source text. It is the original version of a story its author went on to reshape for television, and reading it shows where the series began. The 2011 book tells the story in 336 pages, a compact treatment of material the show spread across three seasons. For viewers who know the series, and especially its much-praised finale, the novel is a chance to see the idea in concentrated form and to watch prose, rather than the camera, carry the inner lives of the people left behind.

Three seasons and 28 episodes on HBO, from June 2014 to June 2017, grew out of a single 336-page novel, so the series necessarily covers far more ground than the book. Later episodes build storylines around the Sudden Departure, such as the lens theory in the episode 'Lens' and the reunion machine in the finale 'The Book of Nora'. The available sources don't say outright that this material is absent from the novel, so treat it as a likely rather than confirmed departure. The geography also appears to widen. The novel is set in a small New York town, while the series later moves beyond it, spending time in Melbourne in 'G'Day Melbourne' and setting its finale in Australia. Beyond these points, and with no reliable comparison of the two endings, the show seems largely faithful to the book as far as is known.