The Last Day: A Novel

by Andrew Hunter Murray

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Wonderful: boldly imagined and beautifully written—the best future-shock thriller for years.”—LEE CHILD

A visionary and powerful debut thriller set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian near-future—with clear parallels to today's headlines—in which the future of humanity lies in the hands of one woman, a scientist who has stumbled upon a secret that the government will go to any lengths to keep hidden.

A world half in darkness. A secret she must bring to light.

It is 2059 and the world has crashed. Forty years ago, a solar catastrophe began to slow the planet's rotation to a stop. Now one half of the globe is permanently sunlit, the other half trapped in an endless night. The United States has colonized the southern half of Great Britain—lucky enough to find itself in the narrow habitable region left between frozen darkness and scorching sunlight—where both nations have managed to survive the ensuing chaos by isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

Ellen Hopper is a scientist living on a frostbitten rig in the cold Atlantic. She wants nothing more to do with her country after its slide into casual violence and brutal authoritarianism. Yet when two government officials arrive, demanding she return to London to see her dying college mentor, she accepts—and begins to unravel a secret that threatens not only the nation's fragile balance, but the future of the whole human race.

“A tantalizing, suspenseful odyssey of frustration, deceit, treachery, torture, hope, despair, and ingenious sleuthing . . . Murray has so thoroughly thought through the ramifications of his conceit and conjured up such a dramatic plot and stellar cast of characters that he might have set a new standard for such tales.”—The Washington Post

• ISBN10: 1524745812
• ISBN13: 9781524745813
• Publish Date: 4 February 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Dutton
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 384
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781524745813

Reviews

[shannonmiz]

You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight

What happens if the world literally stops spinning? Well, The Last Day posits that question, and ventures a guess at the aftermath. The scenario appealed to me at once, as I absolutely adore stories like this. I will say that for me, the one negative was that this focused less on rebuilding the world and more on a bit of a mystery at how/why/at whose hand the world was falling deeper into an abyss. As such, it lent to some draggier bits, at least for me personally.

Overall though, I quite enjoyed the story. The world-building was great; the author did a wonderful job incorporating knowledge of the whole Earth (not just England), while explaining gaps in the knowledge base of the characters. Honestly, it's what I beg for from every similar book and rarely get. Hopper.. she's bitter, jaded, and leery. And it makes complete sense for her to be such. She's lost her parents and lives fairly reclusively on a rig until an old college mentor seeks her out on his deathbed.

And sure, I wanted more rig (guess I'll just have to write that one myself!), but I loved seeing what was going on in London and its outskirts. At first glance, it seems somewhat close to "normal". But when you look deeper, things are not going great. People are starving, and there simply isn't enough arable land to support the population. And so, with a final clue from her mentor, Hopper goes off in search of answers. Can anyone be trusted? Can the world, humanity, be saved? These are the questions Hopper seeks to solve, and in doing so she'll find out exactly who she can- and more likely, can't- trust.

Bottom Line: While it has a few slower bits, I enjoyed Hopper's journey so much that I was eager to find the answers with her.