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Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva's gritty, suspenseful, fast-paced debut novel.
She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens - but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them - a young woman the show's producers call Zoo - stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life - and husband - she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills - and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways - and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
Sophisticated and provocative, The Last One is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated.
"Starred Review. Fueled by brilliantly intimate and insightful writing as well as an endearing and fully realized female lead, this apocalyptic novel draws its power from Zoo's realizations about society and herself as she struggles to survive long enough to somehow make it back to her home and, hopefully, her husband." - Publishers Weekly
"Part wilderness-survival thriller and part dystopian pandemic story ... a gripping portrayal of an ordinary person's evolving survival instincts as she realizes she can't trust the reality she sees." - Booklist
"An astute and compelling entry into the post-apocalypse genre." - Kirkus
"The Last One seamlessly melds two of our contemporary obsessions - the threat of global catastrophe and the staged drama of reality TV - into a fiercely imagined tale of the human psyche under stress. This is an uncompromising, thought-provoking debut." - Justin Cronin
"Haunting, moving, and remarkable, Alexandra Oliva's debut novel is clever in its concept and gripping in its delivery. This propulsive book is for everyone who ever thought reality television signaled the end of the world." - Karen Joy Fowler
"Taut, tense, and at times almost unbearably real, The Last One is both a compelling read and a terrifyingly believable evocation of survival against the odds." - Ruth Ware
"Like The Hunger Games, Alexandra Oliva's novel is page-turning and deeply unsettling." - Rosamund Lupton
"Tense and gorgeous and so damn clever ... I loved every second." - Lauren Beukes
This information about The Last One was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexandra Oliva was born and raised in upstate New York. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. The Last One is her first novel.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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