The Last: A Novel
The Last: A Novel book cover

The Last: A Novel

Paperback – February 18, 2020

Price
$12.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
352
Publisher
Atria
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1501198830
Dimensions
5.31 x 0.88 x 8.25 inches
Weight
9.6 ounces

Description

“A brilliantly executed novel…the questions Jameson poses—who will be with you at the end of the world, and what kind of person will you be?—are as haunting as the plot itself. This is a chilling and extraordinary book .” -- Emily St. John Mandel, bestselling author of Station Eleven“An unusual thriller in which Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None collides with Stephen King's The Shining and Nevil Shute's apocalyptic chestnut On The Beach . . . . The Last tells a story readers will get lost in.” -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air“ A clever, original, scarily plausible white-knuckle read. ” -- Erin Kelly, author of He Said/She Said" The Last is impossible to put down . Nuclear apocalypse meets murder mystery, with an amazing cast of characters. It's Stephen King meets Agatha Christie , in this fantastic and highly original novel that I'll be recommending to readers for a long time to come. I loved every second of it! This is *the* book of 2019 ." -- Luca Vesta, author of Dead Gone"Ms. Jameson writes about the end of the world with the authenticity of one who has witnessed it and come back to tell the tale. Her characters are complex and compelling, and she depicts group and survivor psychology with deft and empathetic detail. The plot is gripping, and thoroughly and frighteningly believable. I could not put this book down ." -- Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters"Dark, original, compelling." -- CJ Tudor, author of The Chalk Man"Reminiscent of The Shining . Jameson delivers an eerie and unsettling tale, made even more so by its frequent mundanity. . . . Propulsive reading. . . . A thoughtful page-turning post-apocalyptic tale." ― Kirkus Reviews "[An] engrossing post-apocalyptic psychological thriller. . . . Jameson asks powerful questions about fear, community, and self-interest while exploring human interactions that range wildly from the tender to the brutal to the purely mercenary. She succeeds in evoking a palpable, immanent sense of tension in a story that’s equal parts drama and locked-room murder mystery." ― Publishers Weekly “This genre-bending novel neatly embraces dystopian fiction and murder mystery, with the Omega Man starkness of the former and the requisite twists and turns of the latter.” ― BookPage, Top Pick “Part mystery, part apocalyptic, The Last is a mind-bending reading experience. Jameson writes a quiet kind of suspense, where tension ebbs-and-flows between mild discomfort and heart-pounding terror.” ― The Brazen Bull Hanna Jameson is the author of the London Underground mystery series the first of which, Something You Are , was nominated for a CWA Dagger Award. She lives in London.

Features & Highlights

  • This propulsive post-apocalyptic thriller “in which Agatha Christie’s
  • And Then There Were None
  • collides with Stephen King’s
  • The Shining
  • ” (NPR) follows a group of survivors stranded at a hotel as the world descends into nuclear war and the body of a young girl is discovered in one of the hotel’s water tanks.
  • Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife’s text message:
  • I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you.
  • But as he’s waiting in the lobby of the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic conference, still mulling over how to respond to his wife, he receives a string of horrifying push notifications. Washington, DC, has been hit with a nuclear bomb, then New York, then London, and finally Berlin. That’s all he knows before news outlets and social media goes black—and before the clouds on the horizon turn orange. Two months later, there are twenty survivors holed up at the hotel, a place already tainted by its strange history of suicides and murders. Jon and the rest try to maintain some semblance of civilization. But when he goes up to the roof to investigate the hotel’s worsening water quality, he is shocked to discover the body of a young girl floating in one of the tanks, and is faced with the terrifying possibility that there might be a killer among the group. As supplies dwindle and tensions rise, Jon becomes obsessed with discovering the truth behind the girl’s death. In this “brilliantly executed...chilling and extraordinary” post-apocalyptic mystery, “the questions Jameson poses—who will be with you at the end of the world, and what kind of person will you be?—are as haunting as the plot itself.” (Emily St. John Mandel, nationally bestselling author of
  • Station Eleven
  • ).

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(1.2K)
★★★★
25%
(1K)
★★★
15%
(622)
★★
7%
(290)
23%
(953)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Unreadable garbage

Absolutely terrible. This is some of the most amateurish writing I have ever experienced. I am a VERY avid reader and just finished the Silo Trilogy while on vacation in Fiji and dug into this absolutely abysmal tome.

I really enjoy the apocalyptic genre when done well like the original The Stand (not the unedited version released years later), the Passage, Dog Stars and The Road to mention a few of the best. This is so poor and literally nothing believable about it or relevant to any kind of holocaust.Could just be a bunch of uninteresting, unlikable characters stuck in a hotel during a snowstorm.

Every character talks like every other character; countless statements are inappropriately followed by exclamation points like a comic book; verbal interactions aren't followed by "replied" "said" "responded" or anything normal but the verb used at nauseam is "snapped." Everyone when speaking to someone "snaps" at them and is pissed off for no apparent reason at what is an innocuous comment by the other party. Really stupid.

The denouement is absurd and lacks any plausibility or really any relation to the entire story except in the most tangential manner. One of the worst books I have ever read and I have forced my way through some terrible ones out of sheer stubbornness.

Avoid!
6 people found this helpful
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POST-APOCALYPTIC THRILLER

"The Last" is about a nuclear apocalypse AND a murder mystery with an interesting cast of characters that explores human nature in the face of adversity.

Jon, an American college professor/historian, is attending a conference in Switzerland & is enjoying a complimentary breakfast at his hotel, when IT happened. Washington, DC has been bombed. NY, Berlin, London & Scotland, as well. The Internet is down & cell phones are useless. There are roughly 20 people in the hotel. Most of the time, they hide away in their rooms wondering if the bombing is still going on & whether one will hit them soon. He can't stop thinking about his wife & daughters back home in San Francisco and his parents in Mississippi. He wonders if they're alive. It's what preoccupies his mind. He feels like a hypocrite agonizing about finding a way back to his family when he was so desperate to leave them.

The water has been running cloudy & tasted off, so several of the men go up to the roof to check the water tanks. They find the tank is almost empty & there's a dead child in there; a girl about 7 or 8. She couldn't have gotten onto the roof & climbed into the tank on her own. She had to have been murdered. The person who did it could still be in the hotel. Jon makes it his business to find out who she was & what happened to her. It gives him a sense of purpose in a post-civilized world. Everyone is a potential suspect.

After 2 months, a small group of men leave the hotel. None of them want to go. They head for a huge superstore with a list of things they need. They're ambushed by people & they kill them in self-defense. They're running low on food & expeditions are getting more dangerous. The rainwater they've been drinking is radioactive. But, the world didn't end. Jon is still surviving, grieving & writing about it day by day.
4 people found this helpful
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Boring Read

There are a lot of reviews saying they couldn’t put the book down, I’m struggling to pick the book up. I love end of the world books and have read so many good ones. This book drags and not real thrilling. If it weren’t for the very (very, very, very) few mentions of the bombs, you would never know the world ended. There’s no survival urgencies, they just sit in a hotel getting high. Characters are boring. Don’t waste your money.
1 people found this helpful
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I liked it. My sister liked it.

I rarely read fiction, but this came recommended from a friend. It was the first book in years that I "couldn't put down". I gave it to my older sister as a gift, she enjoyed it too. A few nitpicks, but that's reading for ya.
1 people found this helpful
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Poor attention to details.

Writer is a female. And it shows. The main character is a man, John. And you can tell in the writing that the character does and says things that are definitely written from a female perspective. And also failure to detail. At one point, John is arguing with his wife. She opens a bottle of wine, pours a glass. Then grabs the bottle on her way out of the kitchen. The next morning John is talking about "wiping up the red wine I had spilled in the kitchen, last night". Wrong! And I kept reading, expecting some big revelation or big event...but nada. And the ending was completely anticlimactic.
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Couldn't stop reading, disappointing end.

Good book and a great read. However I felt let down by the ending. The mystery seemed to be rushed at the end towards a conclusion. However I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a short term read.
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THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT....

I bought this book when I was in London last year, pre-corona virus. It is a dystopian novel about worldwide nuclear destruction. A group of guests at a remote Swiss hotel suddenly find themselves stranded and seemingly isolated, as the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. The social order is now cast adrift. What will they do?

As they struggle to establish a social order to try and survive, a dead body is discovered. They try to discover what happened and seek to establish new social norms. In doing so, each Is revealed for whom they are and of what each one is capable. The story is told through the observations and interviews garnered by one of the guests, who happens to be a historian.

The book is interesting and held my attention. While I found it to be a bit disjointed, at times, and it seemed to meander, at others, the core of the book seemed to hold together. It even had a few sly references as to the cause of the nuclear holocaust. I leave it to you to discern as to who it is some think is capable of causing such a world wide disaster. Overall, this novel succeeds in delivering an interesting read.