Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2019
288 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
Remember your just-in-cases. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives.
Raised in isolation by her mother and Maeve on a small island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen's life has revolved around training to fight a threat she's never seen. More and more she feels the call of the mainland, and the prospect of finding other survivors.
But that is where danger lies, too, in the form of the flesh-eating menace known as the skrake.
Then disaster strikes. Alone, pushing an unconscious Maeve in a wheelbarrow, Orpen decides her last hope is abandoning the safety of the island and journeying across the country to reach the legendary banshees, the rumored all-female fighting force that battles the skrake.
But the skrake are not the only threat…
Sarah Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive is a brilliantly original imagining of a young woman's journey to discover her true identity.
"[Orpen's] Irish-lilted prose conveys her voice with total authenticity…The stellar character work and rapid pacing will be enough to hook readers. First-time novelist Davis-Goff has a firm grasp of good storytelling and one hopes that this confident debut will mark the beginning of a long bibliography." - Booklist (starred review)
"With a bleak setting, waves of action, and immersive worldbuilding, Davis-Goff's debut successfully blends horror, lyrical prose, and feminist themes." - Kirkus Reviews
"It's as much an exploration of inexpressible grief and loss as it is a rocket-paced page-turner, as much a coming-of-age story as it is a testament of resilience in impossible circumstances. And it left me feeling almost as queasy as Orwell did." - Irish Independent
"A riveting novel. The fierce, unflinching voice of Orpen stayed with me long after I finished the last page. It is often grim, even terrifying, but through it all I was reminded that even in the darkest times, love and human decency can survive." - Eowyn Ivey, bestselling author of The Snow Child and To the Bright Edge of the World
"Last Ones Left Alive combines the spare poetry of The Road with the dizzying pace of 28 Days Later. A beautiful book, lyrical in its violence, painting in vivid strokes the joy and brutality of the human experience. An original, brilliant take on the end of the world." - Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters
This information about Last Ones Left Alive 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.
Sarah Davis-Goff's writing has been published in the Irish Times, The Guardian and LitHub. Last Ones Left Alive is her debut novel. She was born and lives in Dublin.
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