This rreview is written with thanks to Pigeonhole for the opportunity to read and review The Last One At The Party.

Blurb:

HER NEW LIFE BEGAN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

It’s December 2023 and the world as we know it has ended.

The human race has been wiped out by a virus called 6DM (‘Six Days Maximum’ – the longest you’ve got before your body destroys itself).

But somehow, in London, one woman is still alive. A woman who has spent her whole life compromising what she wants, hiding how she feels and desperately trying to fit in. A woman who is entirely unprepared to face a future on her own.

Now, with only an abandoned golden retriever for company, she must travel through burning cities, avoiding rotting corpses and ravenous rats on a final journey to discover if she really is the last surviving person on earth.

And with no one else to live for, who will she become now that she’s completely alone?

Review:

When I signed up to read The Last One At The Party, I wasn’t sure it was the right time to be reading a book about a deadly virus that kills millions of people. However, my worries were soon put to rest as I became immersed in the new life in which our narrator finds herself. The first question I asked myself is “How would I cope in a similar situation?” and I quickly realised the answer is probably not very well! Clift’s imagining of the end of the world is very intriguing and she raises issues I hadn’t thought about, such as the electricity supply and the use of transport. 

We are taken through the end of the world by a narrator who never tells us her name. It took me some time to warm to her, particularly as she seems to make some strange decisions, but as we learn more about her story, I felt more sympathy for her. Clift writes with a dark humour that certainly helps us to get to know the narrator better. There are some poignant moments in the novel that allowed me to connect with her emotionally. I can’t write about the characters in the novel without mentioning Lucky, the dog. I took him to my heart straight away and hoped that nothing terrible would happen to him. 

The ending of the novel is very open and I will be thinking about our narrator and Lucky for a while yet.

The Last One At The Party is available from Amazon.