The Last
Ratings33
Average rating3.4
For fans of high-concept thrillers such as Annihilation and The Girl with All the Gifts, this breathtaking dystopian psychological thriller follows an American academic stranded at a Swiss hotel as the world descends into nuclear war—along with twenty other survivors—who becomes obsessed with identifying a murderer in their midst after 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. Now, two months later, there are twenty survivors holed up at the hotel, a place already tainted by its strange history of suicides and murders. Those who can’t bear to stay commit suicide or wander off into the woods. Jon and the others try to maintain some semblance of civilization. But when the water pressure disappears, and Jon and a crew of survivors investigate the hotel’s water tanks, they are shocked to discover the body of a young girl. As supplies dwindle and tensions rise, Jon becomes obsessed with investigating the death of the little girl as a way to cling to his own humanity. Yet the real question remains: can he afford to lose his mind in this hotel, or should he take his chances in the outside world?
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I think this was good - it read quickly and I definitely wanted to know what happened, both with the nuclear attacks and the murder mystery. The setting and isolation was really well done. It was a bit... anticlimactic though and the ending was a bit of a letdown. But overall, an interesting concept and fairly well done.
An average look into a realistic apocalyptic future
This book had some high hopes. There was potential to build real story and drama between the characters but they just weren't hit. There are some great moments but it ends with a rather loose twist.
It's written well and was good to listen to on audiobook (despite the reader's poor British accent) but it did feel a bit forced to pick up every now and then.
I'd recommend for anyone who's looking for a post-apocalyptic book with very little drama and action but more of a human story.
Three stars for an enjoyable, if unoriginal, post-apocalyptic thriller, let down by an unnecessary and fruitless murder mystery.Spoiler-free review: I received a proof of the book from Viking Books's Twitter account, who described it as ‘an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery set at the end of the world'. Hoping it would capture at least a fraction of the magic of ‘[b:And Then There Were None 16299 And Then There Were None Agatha Christie https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391120695s/16299.jpg 3038872]', I zipped through it in a couple of days. The descriptions of the hotel and occupants were nicely written, and tension was suitably ramped-up as the protagonist grew increasingly suspicious of his fellow survivors.To mention ‘The Last' in the same breath as [a:Agatha Christie 123715 Agatha Christie https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1321738793p2/123715.jpg] is very kind and also misselling it. It played more like an average episode of The Walking Dead, dealing with the realities of survival after the apocalypse and how the relationships of the survivors are affected. Its biggest downfall is that the murder plot became so irrelevant that it could have been removed to no real detriment to the story. At one point, about 70% through, the murder hadn't been mentioned for so long I had forgotten that it was meant to be the main plotline.I enjoyed the majority of the book, but the way that the murder plot is wrapped up was so rushed and half-baked that I couldn't help be disappointed. Avoiding spoilers, the last thirty or so pages pack in so much that the final reveal has no room the breathe. This wasn't helped by the fact that by this point I had no emotional attachment to the murder victim and that the reveal bordered on ridiculous.Thank you to Viking Books UK for supplying me with a copy.
