Recently, when I was wondering aloud what to read, as I so frequently do, my good friend suggested that I might enjoy a book called The Leftovers by an author I’d never heard of named Tom Perrotta. The book is set in modern-day America, and unfolds around the experiences of several characters whose previously unremarkable lives have been irretrievably changed by a surprising event. The basic premise of the book is that, quite suddenly, on an otherwise quite ordinary day, a significant portion of the world’s population is, quite inexplicably, removed from the surface of th