The Last One

by Alexandra Oliva

*******

A dazzling and unsettling novel of psychological suspense. Survival is the name of the game as one woman's mind and body are pushed to the limit.

TWELVE CONTESTANTS

When Zoo agrees to take part in a new reality TV show, In the Dark, she knows that she will be tested to the limits of her endurance. Beating eleven competitors in a series of survival tasks deep in the forest, living on camera at the extremes of her comfort zone, will be the ultimate challenge before she returns home to start a family.

A GAME WITH NO END

As the contestants are overcome by hunger, injury and psychological breakdown, the mind games, tricks and hazards to which Zoo is subjected grow dark beyond belief. This isn't what she signed up for: the deserted towns and gruesome props, the empty loneliness. Is this a game with no end? And what is happening away from the cameras' gaze? Discovering the truth will be just the beginning...

AN ALTERED REALITY

Translated into over twenty languages, The Last One is a gripping, provocative tale of survival - of the fittest, of the best loved, of the relationships that sustain us. It's a searingly modern thriller and a timeless story of a woman's journey home.

Praise for The Last One
'A high-concept, high-octane affair ... The conceit is undoubtedly clever and well executed, but what makesThe Last One such a page-turner is Zoo herself: practical, tough-minded and appealing' Guardian
'Clever in its concept and gripping in its delivery. This propulsive book is for everyone who ever thought reality television signalled the end of the world. Haunting, moving, and remarkable' Karen Joy Fowler, Booker-shortlisted author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

'The Last One seamlessly melds two of our contemporary obsessions -- the threat of global catastrophe; the staged drama of reality TV -- into a fiercely imagined tale of the human psyche under stress. An uncompromising, thought-provoking debut' Justin Cronin, author of international bestseller The Passage

'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, author of international bestseller In a Dark, Dark Wood

'Page-turning and deeply unsettling' Rosamund Lupton, author of international bestseller Sister

'Tense and gorgeous and so damn clever. I loved every second' Lauren Beukes, author of international bestseller The Shining Girls

'Clever in the best sense: Oliva is able to skewer reality show culture and dystopian tropes while never letting concept or critique become more important than a good yarn. The novel is thoroughly steeped in its times-the use of a Reddit-like forum plays a key plot role-but unlike other dystopian novels, it doesn't so much use contemporary times to warn us about potential future collapse as it shows what impact our times have on the ways we think about identity and human relationships. An astute and compelling entry into the post-apocalypse genre' Kirkus

'Gripping portrayal of an ordinary person's evolving survival instincts as she realizes she can't trust the reality she sees' Booklist

• ISBN10: 0718182502
• ISBN13: 9780718182502
• Publish Date: 14 July 2016 (first published 12 July 2016)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 12 April 2017
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Michael Joseph Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[ibeforem]

This was a book that should have been right in my wheelhouse. A story about a reality show mixed with dystopia? Yes, please! But ultimately, I don’t think it fulfilled its promises.

My first problem with it is that the narration style left me feeling very detached from the main character, Sam/Zoo. Some chapters focus on establishing the reality show — what happens at the beginning, and what is happening behind the scenes as the adventure continues. The other chapters are Sam/Zoo wandering on her own, trying to find her way to the end of the game through a world she thinks the producers have created. We’re introduced to all of these characters that mean very little in the end.

The second problem I had with it was that it just didn’t feel very believable by the end. I could buy her disorientation — something happens to her that makes that part believable — but I couldn’t buy her continued drive to complete the game nor her belief that everything she was encountering was created by the show. There was an uncomfortable amount of focus on a dead/not-dead baby/not-baby. And the ending relies on her misunderstanding a piece of information that shouldn’t have been a misunderstanding. It felt like blatant manipulation by the author rather than a honest turn of events.

In the end, I guess the premise was a little too far out for me. I finished it, but I questioned myself along the way.

[cornerfolds]

Read more of my reviews at Cornerfolds.com!

*Review to come!*

Actual rating: 1.5 stars

[Leah]

The Last One is one of those books that leaves you gasping for more – it fully immerses you in its pages, until you can’t think about anything else, and, for my, I couldn’t even start a second book until I had finished The Last One because I was thinking about it so much. It’s very rare I feel like I’m actually, genuinely in the novel, like I’m there alongside the characters, but I felt fully immersed in The Last One. I was right there with Zoo, and the other contestants, I was facing what they were facing and it was horrifying.

At it’s heart, this book is the best mash-up of all the reality television you see on your screens week after week – it’s a book I have longed for, forever. I mean reality TV is like one of the highest watched programmes and yet there’s never been a book set in the Big Brother house, or similar, or out in the Australian jungle mimicking I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, when I reckon they were make excellent novels, as proven by The Last One, which is basically about twelve people who go into the woods and last one standing is the winner. But the challenges are brutal – Hunger Games brutal, although you couldn’t escape the Hunger Games at least in The Last One there was a nifty get out phrase if you couldn’t hack it. It was exhausting reading about the challenges and seeing Zoo’s frame of mind as she completes challenge after challenge. Her narrative was absolutely spot-on, I was there with her the whole way, on edge, because I was questioning what was real and what was for the sake of the show.

But it was the third-person narrative that really amazed me, because it allowed us to see all of the contestants, through the veil of how the reality TV folks saw them, warts and all and that was something else. To see the allegiances, and who was there to win, and the spats and the friendships, and the awful, horrible host.

This book is like your worst nightmare come true. But it’s amazing to read. It really does swallow you whole and doesn’t let you go until you’ve finished. I can see why this book was so hotly contested, why it’s being translated into all these amazing languages, because this is a book that needs to be read. This is a book that will give you nightmares for months afterwards, and depending on how the US election goes, could well be America’s next reality. (That is hopefully a joke.) The Last One is a must-read for 2016, and I will definitely be getting the paperback for my keepers shelf because a re-read will be in order, hopefully when a movie comes out…?

[gmcgregor]

The reality show at the center of Alexandra Oliva's The Last One promises to make Survivor look like child's play. The producers have a summer-blockbuster-sized budget and are planning to get three episodes per week on the air. There's no set end point...once all contestants but one utter a quit phrase to be taken out of play, it will be over, with the final person standing winning $1 million. Since it's the first season, no one knows what to expect. After a series of intense group challenges complete with expensive props and head games to thin the heard a little, the contestants are broken up and sent on solo challenges. They've been told to expect to not see even camera people (the production has drones and hidden cameras), so when one of the contestants, known as Zoo, finds herself wandering alone for a long while, she's not too disturbed. What she and the other contestants don't know is that as they're out there, a global pandemic is decimating the population of the country and the world.

In an interesting and perceptive technique, in the chapters that are presented in the third person, the contestants on the show are referred to by nicknames, like Engineer and Air Force and Asian Chick. Our protagonist, Zoo, is so called because she works at a wildlife center. We come into her story in media res, as she discovers an abandoned supermarket and scavenges for supplies. She steps over what she assumes are very well-made prop bodies. The reader knows that people are dying in large numbers and those bodies are almost certainly real, but out of touch with the outside world, what can Zoo think but to assume that it's all part of the game? Which is exactly what she does think, in the chapters that are told from her perspective. Knowing that the point of the show is to push her to her limits and drive her to quit, she pushes through a bout of severe illness and an attack by a wild coyote, among other things, by rationalizing them as just tricks by the producers.

The obstacles she faces and the turns her journey takes are best left to discovery by the reader. If you're anything like me, you'll get to them quickly. This is the first book I've read in a long time (even of ones I've really enjoyed) that's honest-to-goodness kept me up at night to read more. Most of the time, books I blow through really fast have a lower rating, because when I don't like I book I'm more inclined to push through it as rapidly as I can so I can move on to something I might like better. This book I raced through because I genuinely didn't want to put it down. I read it at lunch, while I got my oil changed on my car, while I was waiting for a meeting to start. The power of the human mind to convince itself of whatever it wants to is not to be underestimated, and the suspense of waiting to see when it would be that Zoo would finally see that the world around her was in real trouble keeps the narrative tension low but constant (her inability to see is literal as well as figurative...early in the book, her glasses are damaged and that helps the suspension of disbelief that the actual magnitude of events doesn't impress itself upon her sooner). I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it!