The Last sets a scarily imaginable scenario where the world as we know it ends when several nuclear bombs are dropped over the largest cities all over the world.
The book is laid out in a diary style, and starts from Day 3 (Day 1 is when the world ended but we only later can read about that day in details) . The diary belongs to an American historian, Jon Keller, who at the time was staying at this remote Swiss hotel in the middle of a forest, for a convention. We learn more about him and the handful of people who remained at the hotel - many fled as they tried to find planes or other means to get home.
I found it extremely interesting, you read about what goes through the minds of the survivors and what kind of things they have to do in order to survive in this new world, where there is no government, no phones, no internet, no food (other than what’s left in stores which is not much as you can imagine!) and nothing that we take for granted now.
I throughly enjoyed the setting, the characters were are well developed, but I feel like the ending could have been better, and the storyline with the hunt for the murderer amongst them, just didn’t quite do it for me, but that’s just my opinion. I actually think the story still would have been great even without the murder mystery, in fact, I think I probably would have enjoyed it more without it!

Thank you NetGalley, the publishers and the author for the free advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion!

The blurb really drew me in for this book, then he cover is also so intriguing i had to read it. A solid story with plenty of mystery and thrills and worry over is it all true and when the world ends could you survive mentally and physically. The narration was spot on, engaging and had me thinking deep and hard about the characters and what they are going through. The story delves onto the idea that to be with people but still be alone at the end of the world can have interesting results.Worth stepping out of your comfort zone and having a go with this story

The Last has an original starting point for a post-apocalyptic novel. Jon learns, via the final gasps of social media, that a nuclear war has devastated the world, while he is at a conference at a remote hotel in Switzerland.

He and his fellow residents are thus doubly cut adrift – not only from civilisation as they knew it, but from all the people and places that matter to them most. They have no obvious ties or affiliations to the people around them and they have to form alliances and identify leaders. Jon, an academic historian, decides to write his account of their experiences.

This, for me, is the most interesting element of the novel. Isolated and unsure if anyone else has even survived, they have to harness the resources they have. Leaders emerge, skills are identified. Conflicts develop.

The second element is a murder mystery around a child found dead at the hotel. It seems she was killed shortly before or after they learnt of the apocalypse. Jon decides to investigate. At a time of crisis, he reverts to what he knows – sifting evidence, forming hypotheses about the past, creating a narrative when nothing makes sense.

There is a certain bleak humour in this and it does allow the author to touch on questions of morality and pragmatism – does the death of a single child matter when there has been mass extermination? How would this new society deal with any perpetrator? It also shows the way we displace at times of crisis and gives Jon a pretext to interview a number of other hotel residents. Overall, though, I felt it was the weaker part of the story.

I loved elements of The Last – the unique setting, the characterisation, the lack of obvious heroes and villains, the political debates that resist over-simplification. The sparring between the liberal but rather self-regarding Jon and the gun-loving libertarian Tomi are particularly bracing – you sense the author’s sympathies are with Jon’s worldview but Tomi gets all the best lines.

The end was disappointing and a bit rushed. Without giving too much away, there is a change in the characters’ understanding of what’s left of the world which raised some fascinating questions, but this is hardly examined at all. (It made me wonder if the author was planning a sequel but I’m not sure if you can have a post-post-apocalyptic novel.)

The focus shifts back to the mystery and to Jon’s past life, and a whole lot of information is dumped at once. The final few scenes are a bit repetitive and what could have been a key revelation about Jon’s past is overshadowed because it is already alluded to in dialogue.

Despite these reservations, I enjoyed reading The Last. Hotels are odd places at the best of times, with their calibrated comforts and cheery soullessness, and it’s intriguing to consider the particular challenges of living out all our last days in the world of the trouser press and the hospitality tray.

Breaking: Nuclear weapon detonates over Washington

Breaking: London hit, thousands feared dead

Breaking: Munich and Scotland hit. World leaders call for calm

Historian Jon Keller is on a trip to Switzerland when the world ends. As the lights go out on civilization, he wishes he had a way of knowing whether his wife, Nadia and their two daughters are still alive. More than anything, Jon wishes he hadn’t ignored Nadia’s last message.

Twenty people remain in Jon’s hotel. Far from the nearest city and walled in by towering trees, they wait, they survive.

Then one day, the body of a young girl is found. It’s clear she has been murdered. Which means that someone in the hotel is a killer.

As paranoia descends, Jon decides to investigate. But how far is he willing to go in pursuit of justice? And what kind of justice can he hope for, when society as he knows it no longer exists?

I think, for many, the premise of The Last by Hanna Jameson is the stuff of nightmares. You’re away from home, far from family and friends, and a nuclear war breaks out. Quickly news dries up. The media, traditional and social, disappear and you’re on your own. The interconnectedness of the 21st century is no longer available. The only people with you are strangers and they are all suffering through exactly the same traumatic event as you. Your comfortable life is gone, suddenly survival and safety are paramount. Who can you trust? Will any help arrive? Is there even anyone left out there who could help?

Jon Keller finds himself in this exact situation. Trapped in the Swiss Alps while various factions in the outside world attempt to blow one another to Hell. Jon’s default reaction to the situation is to stick with what he knows. He is a historian, he knows the importance of chronicling events. The mystery of a dead girl in the hotel gives him the perfect opportunity to play to his own strengths. Having a task he can focus his entire attention on means he can ignore the larger picture. Events unfolding outside of the immediate area are pushed to one side. Jon doesn’t need to dwell on what might be happening elsewhere. For him, this is the perfect coping mechanism.

The setting adds an additional layer of tension, and depth, to proceedings. A lonely hotel, isolated from the rest of the world, is a perfect breeding ground for secrets. There is a history of dark deeds associated with the building and even a suggestion of the supernatural. Each day without news of the outside world ensures the survivors become that little bit more withdrawn, a little bit more introverted. Tempers begin to fray and as the collective cabin fever of the group continues to grow you get a real sense that it is only a matter of time before something else terrible is going to happen. The murder feels like it is just to tip of the iceberg. A group of strangers forced together in an extraordinary set of circumstances ensures that everyone is a suspect.

If you’ve read and enjoyed Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, or The Ship by Antonia Honeywell, then you’ll find a lot to enjoy here. I was also reminded of The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters. The Last explores some similar themes; if society as we know it is coming to an end, then is there any point uncovering the truth behind a crime. Does justice even matter anymore? Jon certainly thinks the answer is a resounding yes. So much so, it becomes his obsession. The problem with obsessions is they have a tendency to become all consuming.

Why am I constantly drawn to apocalyptic fiction? I think The Last by Hanna Jameson answers this question in the most elegant manner possible. Reading about the end of the world is a constant reminder of how fragile humanity is. Our existence is a fleeting, ephemeral affair and this particular sub-genre of fiction shines a light directly at that fact. It may seem a little strange, but I find that oddly hopeful. Of course there is the trauma of the initial event, death and destruction at every turn. After that though, when the dust has settled, there are a myriad of possibilities. When I read about everything ending, it inevitably makes me think about what comes next. Jameson’s narrative hints at exactly that. Once the immediacy of the current situation is resolved what will become of Jon and the other survivors? Can society rebuild or even evolve into something better? This is why I find apocalyptic fiction so insightful, it highlights the best and worst of human nature.

The musical recommendation to accompany The Last continues the apocalyptic theme. The Last of Us (volume 2) by Gustavo Santaolalla has a haunting, desolate air that perfectly captures the tone that I think The Last is trying to convey.

The Last is published by Viking and is available from 31st January. Highly recommended.

Woah this story is such a harrowing and mysterious end of days read. I will not be able to convert how amazing this book is. All I know in January I have read two books and that are contenders for book of the year..this is the 2nd.

I have a serious hangover with this book. It has let me think about my actions and reactions if I saw the headlines that there had been a nuclear attack on the world. It reminded me of conversations of old I use to have with my Dad when we would watch Terminator 2 for the umpteenth time and the scene where there was a nuclear explosion which looked to wipe out the world would be our discussion point. I still wouldn’t know what to do if I survived and experienced this, but I know I would probably have to keep fighting to survive like Jon the MC.

I have read a review by Janel over at Keeper of the Pages where this book she said this book was a bit like The Walking Dead without the zombies and I have to completely agree, also the Agatha Christie twist when a body of a young girl is found in the water tanks. Jon sets off trying to solve this mystery mainly to stay sane but because something just does not sit right with him as she is murdered BEFORE the attack.

The chapters are named the number of days after THE DAY and we meet Jon on day 3, trying to recount what has happened and how he feels. Trying to tell us about the last few people he knows who exist in the hotel and all the different reasons that they are in the hotel. The hotel feels so enormous when reading this at least five floors full of rooms, all slowly becoming inhabitable as there is little to no electricity so the door locks fail, moving down the levels of the building. Like I said this book is harrowing, reading how these people are living and the death of a girl. Learning slowly how people came to the hotel and the touchings of the supernatural. There were many times where I was on bated breath and wrapped up in a tight coil when they leave the hotel looking for food and going on scavenger hunts, it was so nerve-wracking, who would they meet if anyone? I am not sure what would be worse, meeting someone or meeting no one?!

Whilst the search for the “killer” is at the forefront of Jon’s mind, it is mainly to keep their minds active as there is literally nothing else to focus on. His laptop had died weeks ago so no access to the outside world, and he is wondering if the killer is still with them, but could that just be the paranoia as nothingness sets in?

I cannot fathom how much I have been affected by this book. It has shocked me to the core and with an ending such as that, I don’t think I will be able to rest easy at any rate. This is a first class book, I was hooked wanting to know what the hell was going on, who had done what and why, and would anyone make it out alive?

This is my first writing with Ms Jameson and her writing is exquisite, she knows exactly how much and how little to say things to either you sated for awhile or to get the heart pumping with bewilderment or fear. This will take me a long time to get over this book as it’s very now, this thing could happen at any time and it has always worried me to the core. It is such a fantastic piece of writing and it hits home a few things for the reader, it has made me want to reevaluate a few things in my life. Seriously this book needs a chance to be under your skin and fester for a while and stay there. I can not recommend this highly enough.

“Nadia once told me that she was kept awake at night by the idea that she would read about the end of the world on a phone notification. It wasn’t exactly Kennedy’s Sword of Damocles speech, but I remember that moment word for word.
“For me, three days ago, it happened over a complimentary breakfast.”

‘The Last’ by Hanna Jameson is an End of the World novel but a thoroughly 21st Century take on the Apocalypse. Conference attendees at a secluded countryside hotel south of Zurich watch their phone screens in horror as World War III erupts. The world’s capital cities fall one by one on social media. Online footage showing the vaporisation of London “didn’t seem as real as the headlines” seeming “too fast, and too quiet.” And then, almost worse than the end of the world, the internet goes down…
The story that follows is told in the diary of Dr. Jon Keller, an American lecturer, who chronicles his and his fellow guests’ reactions to the limited news they have, to the strange coloured clouds, the lack of rain, of sunlight, to the fear of radiation poisoning. Some cannot cope and commit suicide; others deal with practicalities, rationing fuel and resources, finding food, burying the dead. And then, when the water runs cloudy and tastes off, an exploration of the water tanks on the roof reveals a dead body, a murder that occurred in the days leading up to the nuclear war.
‘The Last’ is an exciting and original novel told in a very compelling and naturalistic way. The journal form is perfect for a narrative in which the protagonist literally has no knowledge of the state of the world outside the remote hotel location. This is not a big apocalyptic novel, it is a small scale story of survival of people coping with the unknown.

‘…No one panicked, we didn’t go all Lord of the Flies. It could be fine.’

Of course, as the survivors eventually have to venture outside the hotel, we suspect that it will not be fine. The rhythm of Keller’s journal entries changes as key events occur. We go from a series of short daily entries commenting on his depression and then boredom to longer, frantic passages bringing us up to date with major events which have happened in extended periods during which Keller has been away from his book.
I loved this novel. I loved the concept when I heard about it on ‘Two Crime Writer’s…’ podcast. I have never read Hanna Jameson before and, while I understand this book is something of a departure for her, I really like the way she writes and will have added her previous books to my TBR list.

Jon, a historian, is staying at an isolated hotel at a conference when the world goes mad. Nuclear war breaks out and it is impossible to find out how much of civilisation has survived.

Those who chose to remain wander around like lost souls. Dyln. the hotel security chief is the one they look to as leader- nobody else seemed to want the job. In order to keep busy Jon decides to keep a diary of the postapocalypse as well as chronicle who is left along with their stories. When there is problem with the water tanks & a child's body is found he also has a murder mystery to solve.But everyone has their secrets & agendas- will anybody be left to tell the tale.

This book took a bit of getting into but once I did I was hooked. Adding a murder to the already major event of the end of civilisation was an unexpected addition.

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book.

Such a promising premise for this one: what if nuclear war broke out while you were at a conference in a remote location in the Swiss Alps? What if you find a murder has been committed and that one of the survivors camping out with you in that hotel must have done it? Yet this novel, described inevitably as And Then There Were None meets The Road, really doesn’t live up to that promise. There is very little murder mystery in there, much more of an exploration of the psychology of survivors and the minutiae of their daily lives. There is some fun to be had about the differences of opinions between Europeans and Americans, and the ‘hazing’ of someone whom we might consider a Trump supporter, but every theme appears to be mentioned, gone into briefly, and then dropped.

This is the story of a nuclear apocalypse, and a group of survivors stranded in a hotel in Switzerland. As well as being the story of their survival, The Last is also a crime fiction novel. the body of a girl is found on the roof and our narrator decides to investigate her death. Jon Keller decides to keep an account of the end of the world, and that is what we're reading. There are a few suggestions of him being an unreliable narrator but I think that adds to the interest of the book.
I love books about the end of the world, but I don't think I have read one about an actual nuclear holocaust before. there are so many details that you wouldn't think about, such as the bleak cloud cover that blocks out the sun, the toxic rainfall, and the death of the birds and animals. The hotel makes for a slightly unsettling location and I found certain parts of the book had a creepiness to them...a hotel is a large place with many floors that look the same and, of course, many guests seem to have their secrets, as well as it being surrounded by thick forest.
There was a bit of a supernatural suggestion within the book, but i think it was enough to be creepy but not enough to be 100% supernatural (I'm not a fan of the genre at all)
I liked the crime fiction being woven into the story, especially because Jon has so few resources to use...he can't just google something, or watch the CCTV tapes, or read a coroner's report. He has to use his wits and gather info from the other guests.
I was a little unsure of the people turning to cannibalism after only a few months, but I guess it could be possible and it seemed to be only a suggestion.
In novels about the end of the world, I am always concerned about how the author is going to wrap things up. The ending to The Last was a little random, but I think it worked well.

Hanna Jameson describes a scary scenario: a nuclear war between the nations and the end of the world as we know it. Now, imagine that during all this, you are safe in a remote hotel in Switzerland, but with no communication with the outside world, no electricity, and no internet, so you have no idea what is going on out there, you don’t know how many people are still alive, you don’t know if your loved ones are still alive. That’s the story created by the author, a story that made me feel slightly anxious and tense.

Slow-paced and with an atmosphere that, at times, I found claustrophobic, THE LAST is told from the point of view of Jon Keller, an American history professor in Switzerland for a convention. He is staying at the big and isolated Hotel Sixiéme when the world ends so, with no way to reach for his family back in America and not knowing if he will survive, he decides to keep a diary, a journal that records everything that happens in the hotel on the days following the disaster. He interviews the other guests to ask what they remember about the day the world ended, he narrates the panic, the fear, the paranoia that takes hold of everyone in the hotel.

THE LAST can be read as a character study of how people react to catastrophes, how some people just give up on living while others show their surviving skills and fight to live another day. It shows a group of people, mostly strangers, forced to live together and to govern themselves, but they are surrounded by feelings of jealousy and suspicion and they don’t know who they can trust.

While people don’t know what to do, don’t know if they will survive, a mystery in the background keeps Jon busy. The body of a young girl is found in a water tank, she was murdered and Jon becomes obsessed with discovering the killer. This second storyline gives a more suspenseful feeling to the story, especially after it’s revaled that the Hotel Sixiéme has a history of murders in the past.

THE LAST is a dystopian thriller, it’s thrilling, thought-provoking, and well-written and I was so engrossed in it that when I finished reading I looked around and it took me a few seconds to realize that, luckily, there hadn’t been a nuclear war and the world hadn’t ended.

The Last begins with the end of the world as we know it (yes the R.E.M lyrics are intentional). Nuclear attacks have taken place, affecting San Francisco, Munich and Scotland. Little information about these is given, which I think adds to the authenticity of this story, as we the reader are in the same situation as the people involved, cut off from the outside world by devastation and disaster.

Jon Keller is staying at a remote hotel in Switzerland as part of a conference when disaster hits. Some of his fellow conference attendees panic and flee the hotel in the hope of escape. Most are terrified at the prospect of the end of the world as they know it and are paralysed by fear into staying at the hotel.

This seems like the sensible option at first. The hotel is safe, away from the major towns and cities and their chaotic evacuations as people anticipate further attacks. However the hotel is not the place that it first appears to be.

When the body of a young girl is found, her identity a mystery, we realise that the hotel itself is a very mysterious thing. Historically famous for it's slightly creepy, remote location and thirteen floors, amongst other more secretive details that Jon is yet to uncover.

The only thing we know for certain is that her death was not accidental, and she was not killed by the blast, fallout or radiation sickness. In short, she was murdered. Jon, as he begins to document each day since the nuclear attacks, is determined to find out who committed this crime, and whether the hotel residents are in further danger of more than 'just' another nuclear attack.

The Last is a difficult novel to summarise, is it a post apocalyptic thriller? A murder mystery? or something in between? Whatever it is, it is a great novel, with an interesting conclusion!

The Last is a cross between a modern-day Agatha Christie novel and The Walking Dead (minus the zombies), with a splash of Bird Box (in one part where they journey to find food, it had me nervous as hell!), and it was all kinds of brilliant. The cold climate of Switzerland, the isolation of the hotel, twenty people remaining and a murderer amongst them – now, there’s a winning formula for a book! And, Jameson totally delivered on this one, a must read for fans of murder mysteries and dystopian fiction.

Narrated by Jon, in journal-like fashion, he does his best to be objective in his writing, because someone has to document the end of the world, the end of civilization. The reader is privy to his murder investigation, and the survival of those left at the hotel. In order to be as detailed as he can, Jon gathers information on as many of the remaining hotel guests as he can. What was great was the varied mix of the remaining guests; at various points throughout the book, most of the main characters are called into question – what are they hiding?

It was interesting to see how this group of people chose to govern themselves, who they looked to for a leader, and how they tried to keep the peace, and keep themselves safe. The Last is cleverly plotted, it has this constant sense of unease to it, you’re never entirely sure if Jon, or the characters who become your favourite, are safe – and you’re never entirely sure if the threat is from outside or in.

While the murder mystery may be at the heart of this novel, the end of the world makes a bloody great backdrop! This novel will have you invested and engaged, it reads fluidly, with dark undertones; but, there’s also this harshness to it, this acceptance that times are different now, and certain behaviours are acceptable, and necessary.

Do you ever read a book, and one line, more than any other, jumps out at you and you have to make a note of it? In this novel, it was something Jon mentioned in relation to his family:

“If you don’t make the decision to love, every day, it’s an easy thing to forget.”

With today’s governments, you can’t 100% rule out a nuclear war; you never think the end of the world is coming, but if it does, will you be ready for it?

The Last by Hanna Jameson

Jon Keller left his home and family in California for a conference in a hotel in Switzerland unhappy about how he had left things. He really needed to sit down and work things out with his wife for the good of their two adored young daughters. Emails and texts are all very well but home seems such a long way away. And then those emails and texts stop. Everything stops. Modern life comes to an end. Survival instincts have to be dredged up from humanity’s distant prehistoric past. Because one morning, while Jon and his conference colleagues were eating breakfast, nuclear weapons fell on Washington DC and soon they fell everywhere, the last flickers of television chronicled the fall one by one of the world’s cities. Then there was nothing. For Jon, life has shrunk to the dimensions of this hotel, preserved from the bombs by its remote location, so far from cities and any settlements at all.

The Last tells the story of the end of the world from the perspective of one man stranded far from his home, family and country. Jon recounts events in his own words as he records events in a diary. It’s his testimony, a message to his family but ultimately intended only for himself, and its power partly lies in the fact that he can only recall the full details of what happened on that terrible, terrible day bit by bit. And so the narrative frequently returns to Day One.

This is a remote hotel and many fled on the day the world ended and so we have just a small group of men, women and children to observe as they work out how to survive. It’s such a compelling and involving story. But there’s more to it than that when Jon discovers the body of a murdered young girl in the hotel water tanks. Jon is determined to discover the truth about her death, to do right by her as he couldn’t by his daughters, presumed dead in San Francisco. And so The Last is also a murder mystery.

It is, to be honest, a little difficult to focus on the murder mystery in this situation and so our focus instead is on the people in the hotel as they try to form a postapocalypse community, with varying degrees of success. I’m not sure how much I liked Jon but I realise that we’re not seeing him or anyone else at their best. I wasn’t keen on the sections in which characters took refuge in drugs and drink and it was all a bit Lord of the Flies at times, with some relationships becoming tormented. But there are some great and memorable scenes and I loved the way in which the novel developed. It is full of surprises and the end was as good as the excellent beginning.

I love apocalyptic novels and The Last has such a fantastic premise and I particularly enjoyed its setting in Switzerland, becoming increasingly cold and desolate under the encroaching nuclear winter. The joy felt by characters on hearing the rare song of a bird is palpable. There are gems in this novel. I heartily recommend it. And what a brilliant cover!

Jon Keller is at a conference in Switzerland enjoying breakfast at the hotel he is staying at when he receives a push notification to his phone which says, “Breaking: Nuclear attack on Washington in progress. Story developing.” Then another message; “200,000 fatalities”, and another; “the President and staff are dead”. Soon after London is obliterated, followed by Berlin and other cities across the Western world. Stunned, Jon remains at the hotel whilst others flee, leaving behind a rag tag bunch of guests and staff who are waiting for, salvation? Death? Something anyway. But then, they find a body. Is there a murderer amongst them? If so, who?

I absolutely flipping loved this book. It is terrifying because it feels so very real. The actions and behaviour of an American President has led to an unprecedented catastrophe from an unknown assailant and in a moment the world is changed forever. The actions of those in power has caused life to be irrevocably altered for the twenty or so guests left at the hotel. Jon, an American history professor documents the aftermath of the attacks in the form of a diary to ensure that the change to the social and political landscape is available for future historians.

It is through this diary that we see what happens to society when all that we know is decimated. Cliques form, a leader emerges, alliances are created and difficult decisions must be made. Food is scarce as is electricity and, most horrifying of all, there’s no internet. This in particular is such an interesting thing to explore – what does a world do when they are unable to find the answer to something by Googling? More importantly, how do you find out if your loved ones are still alive when you are in a remote hotel in Switzerland and they are on the west coast of America? The thoughts of what has happened to Jon’s wife, Nadia and their children torment him, causing him to lose himself in fantasies of them surviving and escaping or dark thoughts of them dying in a blast, because who knows if the west coast even exists anymore? The last that they heard Scotland was gone so why not America too?

It is the pressure cooker of the hotel that I loved most of all and Hanna Jameson writes this stuff so well. It builds and builds and I never knew quite who to trust. When a body is found in one of the water tanks the whole thing is turned on its head. Suddenly everybody is suspicious and nobody feels safe and the few lone women in the hotel feel particularly vulnerable. It is a tense read and at times horrifying and upsetting – and I don’t mean in a gruesome way, more that it all feels so authentic and it got firmly into my head.

I am a huge fan of dystopian novels so this ticked lots of boxes for me, especially as it concentrates so much on what happens in the immediate aftermath and the fear of what is outside the grounds of the hotel. I find this sort of thing so interesting and love reading about the power plays and the day to day life in a situation like this. It is the normality in the most abnormal of situations that I find intriguing and even though there is a dead body and food is scarce people still get sick and bored. And that is when things get interesting.

If clever dystopian fiction with a lot of humanity and heart is your thing then The Last by Hanna Jameson could be for you. It is only January but this could be one of my books of the year.

***Review to be posted on my blog on publication day and shared to social media sites***

A delicate mix of the locked room 'whoddunnit' and a nuclear induced apocalypse, The Last, explores the lives of 20 survivors trapped at L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland. The problem (beside the obvious)? One of them is a killer.

Haunting and terrifyingly realistic in its plausibility, the story is told through a series of diary entries from our unreliable (and often very douchy) narrator, Jon Keller. Saddled with tension, the entries flit between frantic (even manic) episodes to periods of calm detachment as survivors settle into their post-nuclear routines. Jameson raises interesting moral questions... what kind of person will you become in the face of an apocalyptic situation? What lengths would you go to survive?

Post-apocalyptic novels aren’t something I generally veer towards but there’s a certain fascination that I hold. I am not counting YA in this one because that’s a whole different kind of coffee that I am not prepared to touch at this moment. I have been meaning to read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for almost a year now and I haven’t even gotten around to buying the bloody thing but I did manage to read The Book of M by Peng Shepherd and Severance by Ling Ma though and that was a wild ride.

So with a few people commenting on the somewhat similar approach towards this genre, I was expecting The Last to be more character centered than the actual apocalypse and thankfully, I was right.

The story starts with nuclear explosions happening all over America and then in other parts of the world, we are never really given a proper recount of what happened and the vagueness of it all really helped with the overall feeling of the book. Jon Keller is staying at a remote hotel when all of this happens and quite naturally, there’s chaos when these attacks happen and people slowly lose all connections to the rest of the world. Some people panic and leave the hotel and hope to reach the nearest mode of transport in order to reach their loved ones and some stay at the hotel. Jon is one of those people.

Jon and other occupants of the hotel are trying to survive in this new world by saving electricity/ generators, trying to keep track of everyone staying at the hotel and rationing the food and trying and mostly failing to hide the weapons and ammunition at the hotel. As the time passes and no news of the outside world comes to them, slowly, people start to lose hope and some of the people commit suicide. Preferring that over the inevitable terrible fate that awaits them.

All of it is presented in a sort of documented format as Jon notes down everything that happened since Day One of the nuclear attacks, then as time passed, he starts talking to other people and writes their stories too. He hopes that there will be someone after they have died to know about them. To know that they existed.

In all of this, there’s a murder mystery and that adds a little bit of spice to the whole story which otherwise could have suffered on its own. The hotel being remote and out of reach by normal means made the whole book a bit more creepier, then there was the fact that a girl child is found murdered which made it even more creepier.

The hotel itself is such an important part of the story because not only is it a thirteen floors building in which only a few rooms are occupied but its history is so very shady. Just imagine a big hotel empty except for a few occupants and then imagine walking through the empty hallways, yeah. It is creepy. The hotel remains one of my favourite parts of the book frankly. The whole aesthetic just added to the story.

The characters in the book including Jon are all with their own problems and quirks and bad habits and that made for an entertaining read. Jon is not a particularly likable character neither is he a reliable narrator. That made the whole thing muddier than it probably needed to be but it also made it a bit more realistic. After all, could you really be completely objective when noting down everything that happened after your world ended?

Now, the thing is, despite all those wonderful things I have about this book, the ending felt a bit rushed for me and somewhat unsatisfactory as well. I thoroughly enjoyed the creepiness of the hotel, the very real probability of this happening in near future and the fact that some people finally decided to try to see if there were more survivors or not but I wasn’t totally happy with the way things ended overall.

I gave it 3.75 stars and it totally deserves it, I think. It’s a pretty fun book to read if you are into post-apocalyptic world and a look at how the humanity can react to things afterwards. The Last releases on 31st January, 2019 and will be available to buy from wherever books are sold.

Hanna Jameson is an author whom I first discovered quite by accident. As well as buying many a novel (far too many in fact, like many a bibliophile I find the compunction to purchase books irresistible and have far more titles than I can ever hope to read) as a book blogger I also receive books from publishers and request them through services such as NetGalley, Bookbridgr and NB Magazine. It was when perusing one of the last two - Bookbridgr or NB Magazine, I can’t recall which - that I came across Road Kill, the third title in the author’s series of crime novels. The cover was striking, the description also, and I ordered a copy. A hardback duly arrived and I read it in just one sitting. It was a great book (you can see my review here: https://bit.ly/2HAUu6d) and I quickly purchased the first two novels in the series.

So when I saw that the author had written a new novel, a standalone post-apocalyptic tale of survivors of a nuclear holocaust, I was more than a little intrigued and got hold of a copy. The Last is a big step change from the author’s previous series, which were crime thriller/gangster tales. Instead this tells the story of a collection of ordinary people (in the sense that they’re not gangsters at least, they have more than their share of foibles) who so happen to be guests staying in L’Hotel Sixieme, a hotel in the middle of nowhere in Switzerland, when nuclear war breaks out. They watch in real time via the news, internet and social media as civilisation obliterates itself and now have to deal with the consequences.

The main protagonist is Jon Keller, an American historian. He was attending an academic conference, which was due to be held in a hotel nearer Vienna, but due to that hotel being gutted by fire, was moved with other attendees to L’Hotel Sixieme. For a combination of reasons he decides to keep a journal - his sanity, a desire not to be forgotten and thus a hope that someone might one day read it, an apologia to his wife and children who he left in the states. The novel consists entirely of this journal, which actually proves to be an effective way for this tale to be told.

In the immediate aftermath of the conflagration, most of the guests abandon the hotel, hoping to make it to the airport to fly home to loved ones. This despite the fact that such an act is illogical for most of the destinations they hope to go to have been wiped out. This leaves just a handful of guests, a core of whom Jon, and thus the reader, gets to know well. There are a variety of personalities, some likeable, some not, some who Jon clicks with, others with whom he clashes. When Jon and others find the body of a dead girl crammed into one of the water tanks on the roof they realise she was murdered, likely just before or on the day war broke out. Jon becomes obsessed with this murder and begins to investigate and this adds to the tension, for no longer is it just a matter of whether he gets on with the people there, the suspicion being that one of them is a murderer. Things are further complicated when food becomes scarce and they come across other, hostile survivors from outside the hotel. Soon the guests in the hotel are breaking into cliques, wary and jealous of each other.

My assumption of nuclear war has always been that the world would just be wiped out and there would not be anywhere safe, anywhere survivable. Of course that might be the case, but equally sanity might intrude to limit the exchange. The author never spells out how the war occurred, we learn at the start that the US leadership has been taken out and Scotland destroyed, but equally the nuclear winter that follows is not utter darkness, the internet still functions (albeit haphazardly) and some people and places have survived. This implies that the war hasn’t been all out, that the nuclear powers haven’t unleashed every weapon in their nuclear arsenal. But things are bad and throughout there’s ominous signs: the trees in the surrounding forests are all dying and they rarely hear birds any more. As always, the very real and immediate threat is other people. They quickly discover that the nearest supermarket has been looted already and with other survivors looking for food it’s not long before they are bound to come into conflict with others.

The Last is a very enjoyable take on the post-apocalypse novel, not least because as with the author’s crime novels, there are subtle hints of urban myth and the supernatural. To name just a few: there’s the guest who is convinced that the ghost of a child follow’s him wherever he goes, sits in the corner of whichever room he lays his head; Jon is half-convinced that the hotel itself is cursed and that somehow it was fated for them all to be there at the end of the world; while the murdered girl in the water tank is reminiscent of the death of Elisa Lam, a Canadian woman who was found dead in the water tank of a Californian hotel, a case that has been much ruminated over by those interested in mysteries and urban legends (indeed in Road Kill, the author refers to the the same case in the narrative).

As with any post-apocalypse novel with a backdrop in nuclear war, this novel is not a bed of roses. But despite the subject matter and content, neither is it bleak. The Last is in actual fact rather upbeat in its worldly outlook. With its depiction of the survivors crafting a functioning micro-society amongst themselves and banding together despite the tensions that exists between their factions, it draws a more positive conclusion on the potential of human nature than the author’s earlier gangster novels. Whereas Road Kill was a nihilistic road trip, The Last is a tale of redemption, both of the personal - Jon coming to terms with the mistakes he has made in his past - and for the human race (the nuclear war was of course caused by humans and the survivors in a sense are trying to atone for this).

In conclusion, The Last is a great read and an interesting take on the post-apocalypse genre (which as with dystopia more broadly has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years). It’s well written, compelling, and full of interesting characters. A marked change in tone from the author’s earlier work, I’ll be interested to see what she writes next.

5 out of 5 stars

Three and a half stars!
The Last begins with Nuclear weapons being dropped in various parts of the world and a small group in a Swiss hotel believing they may be all that is left of mankind. I didn't think I was going to like this novel but it was so much more than an end of the world portrayal. It was a study of how people behaved in the light of this possibility which was very well written and quite absorbing. How allegiances were formed and still in a small group how people still distrusted each other and didn't always pull together.
I was very surprised and delighted at how absorbing this story was. I did find the ending rather abrupt as if the author didn't know how to complete her tale, for which I removed half a star.
Many thanks to Netgalley/Hanna Jameson/Penguin UK for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

"Nadia once told me that she was kept awake at night by the idea that she would read about the end of the world on a phone notification."

It's a rather frightening prospect that I felt this actually seemed more likely the way we go out that most other concepts we see in books and films. The human side of a global tragedy.

Nuclear weapons are detonated the world over. Jon Keller is in Switzerland at an isolated hotel for a conference when it happens. With chaos and grief to contend with, dwindling resources and an international group of mismatched guests and staff, Jon tries not to think about his family a continent away. And then a girl's body is discovered in a water tank and despite the ruination of humanity, Jon becomes obsessive about finding out what happened to the murdered child.

With priorities pulling at Jon from different directions, with threats of lawlessness outside and desolation and agitation inside the hotel, the story shows the many sides of a nuclear annihilation. Some survivors panic, others band together, some continue on as they did before while others cannot cope with the upheaval.

I liked the mixture of detective story with an apocalypse plot, and the eclectic cast of characters in the hotel. Jon chronicles their stories for posterity so we get to hear their backgrounds and what brought each to the hotel that missed out on the worst of the world's ills. The whole story is a chronicle told by Jon, who we must trust for our facts.

Of course, readers will wonder just what has happened to the world. We are given a few clues:
a "breakdown in communication between our president and the other representatives of the UN Security Council", so it's a world we may recognise in our own... making it feel quite close to home.

From all the recent apocalypse films, you might expect Rambo-types, battles for territory, but there's a lot of sitting around quietly here, calm mealtimes, even doctor visits. We see various types though, those that are ready do what they must to survive, others who show compassion.

A rather unusual 'end of the world' story, but I felt satisfied at the conclusion seeing how Jon's world was shaping up. Still, let's hope we can avoid this in real life...

With thanks to Netgalley for the sample reading copy.

It's the end of the world as we know it. There are survivors but how many?
The story takes place in a hotel in Switzerland, after a nuclear attack across the world. There are 20 people in the hotel and a few unexplained deaths. The main character is a Historian named Jon who seeks to know the truth about the death of a little girl and what is happening outside the hotel.

Very gripping read! A real page turner.
Perfect for those into Apocalyptic Thrillers who are not into zombie type storylines.
I found this book hard to put down and loved the ending!