Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book. So recently o2 went down and I was unable to use my 3g for the entire day I was at work. I felt like I was in this book. (I am joking, although at one stage my phone did have that scrambling effect and I practically screamed.....till I realized it was someones Instagram photo I had accidentally opened...This book has had a lasting effect on me, I found it difficult to get into at first but once I got going I loved it. I don't usually read this kind of genre but I really enjoyed it. I didn't particularly like the main character I found him very selfish, but that's exactly the way he was written so my reaction to him was just as the author intended. I found him to be a man who had done bad things but now realized, what with the current events, he needed to change and battled with that. It was a gripping story, and even if it doesn't sound like your kind of story I would give it a go! #netgalley #thelast

I really enjoyed reading this book in spite of the post nuclear war setting. Definitely a different approach and well worth a read. I didn't give it a 5 star rating as the ending wasn't as good as I had hoped although I have to admit it was probably an impossible task.

Thanks Netgalley and the Publisher. Not normally the sort of book that I would read and must be honest took me a lot longer (reading other things inbetween) but I carried on and in the end quite enjoyed it.

Loved this book, it kept me captivated from beginning to end. Just when you think it is settling down into a decorated tale, it feels like all hell breaks loose!

Very clever storyline, well written and completely unputdownable.

I was completely gripped by this book which is written in such a way that it's almost hallucinatory; I was never quite sure what was real, what was paranoia or what was were the ravings of a man in the grip of a mental breakdown.
The small group dynamic was particularly effective, both as a means to drive the plot forward - is one of them hiding a murderous secret? - but also utterly fascinating to see how the relationships are forged and fall apart so quickly as each character tries to deal with the unknown.
I would definitely recommend this book if your tastes verge on the dark and dystopian, but perhaps read it 'blind' as it were, rather than rely on the blurb, as I found a very different book between the pages to what I was expecting.

My thanks go to the publishers and Net Galley for the advanced copy in return for an honest review.

Is there life after the end of the world as we know it?

As Jon Keller is waiting for his eggs Benedict at the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland the phone notification comes through – nuclear weapon detonates over Washington, the president, staff and 200,000 confirmed dead. London is gone, so is Berlin and Scotland, the internet is down, so are all the TV channels. Most of the guests scramble to leave the hotel to get to the nearest airport but a group decide to remain until someone comes for them or an official procedure for evacuation is announced. Jon is one of those who choose to remain. He is a historian and decides to write a narrative chronicle of the initial post-nuclear months because if he does not keep writing he will lay down and die, especially if he thinks about not seeing his wife and two daughters ever again. He chronicles the day-to-day life of those that stayed, as well as stories about their lives and what made them who they are and why they ended up where they are.

The author wrote her first book at the age of seventeen and her style is impressive. Q Magazine described her as writing like ‘an angel on speed’ and I was blown away by the concept portrayed in the book, maybe because it is something that is quite possible and something that none of us wants to think about. Where will you be when the end of the world comes? Will you be watching it online or will you be living it, reacting to an explosion or a siren announcing one? The story explores what happens to a group of individuals who realise that no one is coming for them. They spend 71 days at the hotel, surviving and the book explores the relationships that develop when strangers are thrown together in a confined space thinking they may be the only people left on Earth.

Saphira

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

An interesting end-of-days scenario with a murder mystery thread. It’s this thread which gives John Keller purpose throughout the fallout of nuclear Armageddon. I liked the way the breakdown of society was described but the kangaroo court and its outcome was based on survivalist logic with little evidence of guilt. However, I felt the whole book was ruined by the ending, where the murder turned out to be a sacrifice.

Jon Keller learns that the nuclear apocalypse has arrived over breakfast at a remote Swiss hotel. Looking at her mobile phone, a fellow guest gasps the news that Washington DC has just been bombed. Very quickly it becomes apparent that other major cities around the world have suffered a similar fate. Panic erupts as people rush to leave the hotel but Jon and a few others stay, as much through an inability to make a decision as by rational choice. A university professor who lives in San Francisco, Jon is unable to ascertain whether his wife and two children are safe as very quickly telephone and internet access to the outside world is lost.

From this point events are captured through a series of journal entries maintained by Jon. He’s not sure anybody will ever read his record of events but he’s keen to undertake this task, just in case. Around twenty guests have remained at the hotel and nationalities and language barriers quickly create cliques within the group. And the bubbling tension is quickly exacerbated by the discovery of a body in one of the hotel’s water tanks. Is it possible that one of the remaining guests is a murderer?

I do like these dystopian novels: when done well, they delve into the human psyche at every level. What has informed their fight or flight decision (if, indeed, it was a conscious choice)? Will it turn out to be the right one, or does it even matter? Will they all choose stay at the hotel or will some elect to make a run for it, even though it seems unlikely that any airports are still functioning and it's not clear whether danger now lurks outside their current confine? These and many more question will be answered.

The tension constantly increases as events play out. I have to say that I got to the point that I could hardly put this book down – I’d wake up in the morning and make a barely conscious grab for it, anxious to know what was going to happen next. The character development is brilliantly done too and I found my emotional link to a number of players changing as their varying personality traits were exposed. At times the tension was excruciating and at no point did I have a sense that actions of the survivors were anything but true. And for a change, I really like how this book ended. I'll say no more.

A superbly entertaining and thought provoking story - I loved it!

The story starts as your standard post-apocalyptic theme, there are power struggles within the group, a sense of distrust, and discussions generally on how to survive. There’s also another storyline at play here though as Jon discovers a girls dead body in the first few days after the bombs detonate but it seems as if this particular death happened before. Jon takes it upon himself to play detective as he fears that her killer may still be among them.

The author throws in various different prospects and leads that the story could have gone in and I felt a bit disappointed when at the end I realised that these leads were not going to amount to anything. It’s difficult to say here what they are without giving too much away, however, I did still really enjoy this book. I love anything with a post-apocalyptic feel too it. I was a little disappointed with the ending but on the whole this is another solid book for anyone who likes reads with an ‘end of the world’ feel to them.

The Last was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Set in a hotel in Switzerland, a mixed bag of staff and guests find themselves survivors of a nuclear holocaust that seems to have wiped out the rest of the world. When the initial tweets and news stories started to circulate, many of the guests fled for the airport. Those left behind were the ones who had nothing to flee for.

Jon Keller is an American academic who was at the hotel for a history conference. His fellow delegates left but Jon, an uber-rationalist, saw no point in fleeing. The roads would be jammed, the planes would be grounded. Why run?

So we have a fairly standard post-apocalyptic story where people consume their way through a dwindling supply of food and clean water in the hope that a better plan might come to mind. Instead of a better plan, they find a dead body. Despite the entire planet now consisting of dead bodies, Jon decides to pass the time by playing Miss Marple, interviewing everyone and searching their rooms. Armageddon affects people in different ways: some become leaders, some become whingers. Jon becomes a securocrat.

There's a standard fare of journeys out into the wilderness, raiding ransacked supermarkets, fighting off predators and such. There are unlikely friendships, amusing animosities. The supporting cast conveniently includes a doctor, a head of security, a desk clerk who understands the record keeping. There's a rapist and a feminist, a Japanese family with young children... It's all a bit like a 1970s disaster movie but without the nuns. Oh, and with occasional use of mobile phones.

At points, the plot becomes impenetrable. The pacing seems wonky, there are moments when people seem to behave with great irrationality. There are enough loose ends to run at least six sequels. It should be corny, but somehow it manages to be fun. I suspect the thing that holds it all together is the pomposity of Jon, recording everything in a self-serving tone of spurious even-handedness - for posterity - and imagining what the fellow survivors really think of him busy bodying around and playing detective while they focus on the future of humanity.

A murder mystery at the end of the world sounds like a fun concept but Hanna Jameson has no idea how to write it. The characters merge into one, the murder mystery is plain boring, there's no real sense of danger, tension or doomed atmosphere. The dialogue is dull - characters just pootle around, our protagonist boringly moons over his dead family and oh I didn't care. Such plodding, uninspired writing - so disappointing given the freshness of the concept. It could work in a more competent writer's hands.

Initially I struggled with this book due to the amount of time the author spent describing everything. I appreciate that this was for my benefit as the reader and I am glad I stuck with it. I really enjoyed this book once I got into it. post apocalyptic Agatha Christie, would definitely recommend this.

The Last - Hanna Jameson
An apocalyptic end of the world story with an additional murder mystery wrapped up in it? Well, colour me interested.
This reminded me of The Shining crossed with High Rise crossed with Station Eleven and And Then there were None. It makes for an interesting post-apocalyptic end of the world read.

Breaking: Nuclear weapon detonates over Washington Breaking: London hit, thousands feared dead Breaking: Munich and Scotland hit. World leaders call for calm
Historian Jon Keller is on a trip to Switzerland when the world ends. As the lights go out on civilization, he wishes he had a way of knowing whether his wife, Nadia and their two daughters are still alive. More than anything, Jon wishes he hadn't ignored Nadia's last message.
Twenty people remain in Jon's hotel. Far from the nearest city and walled in by towering trees, they wait, they survive. Then one day, the body of a young girl is found. It's clear she has been murdered. Which means that someone in the hotel is a killer. As paranoia descends, Jon decides to investigate. But how far is he willing to go in pursuit of justice? And what kind of justice can he hope for, when society as he knows it no longer exists?

I don't know what it was about The Last that made me request it when I saw an ARC available for review. I don't know if it was the minimalist cover or the idea of the fall out of nuclear war that interested me, but I am glad that I selected it because this was a RIDE.

The story is narrated by Jon, a historian before the world as he knew it ended. He had been in Switzerland for a conference at the hotel and when the news broke, he knew there would be no way of getting home safely so he thought he'd wait it out in the hope that someone would come save them... I guess he was taking his survival tips from Shaun of the Dead...



When it transpires that everyone at the hotel is all that's left of humanity, he decides to document everything, just in case. He and some of the other survivors head to the roof to check the water situation and discover the body of a child who had been killed and thrown into a water tank. Jon decides he has to solve this mystery and is convinced that her killer remains in the hotel, and so, the murder mystery element of the story begins. The isolation of this group in the remote hotel, which it turns out has had lots of mysterious deaths on site over the years created so much tension - this would make an excellent movie, the atmosphere of the creepy hotel, the rural location and the back drop of nuclear fall out was amazing. It was kind of unsettling, especially with how plausable nuclear war could be with the current politcal climate. It felt very claustrophobic with the majority of the action happening in one place, but I raced through it.

While you might look at this and decide it's a tad scary - don't worry it isn't, it is creepy but the horror comes from human panic rather than anything else. Actually... Now I think about it, humans are scarier than monsters. You also never find out who it is that does the nuclear bombing, so the paranoia is real.

Jon was a great narrator, I love me an unreliable narrator! His very matter of fact journal like entries always were just enough to get my imagination running and I especially liked how Hanna Jameson managed to give a cheeky nod to the meme about how male writers describe women!

Anyway, this was good fun!

A nuclear holocaust and a band of disperate characters marooned in a mountainous hotel - what could go wrong?

Told from the point of view of an American journalist, this book explores what happens when the rule book is Thrown away an surviving is paramount.

Creepy, dark and intelligent, full of misdirection and a classic whodunit. It’s the shining for the 21st century.

It took me a while to get into this book, partly because I was expecting a typical post-apocalyptic/dystopian story and this book has so much more to it. In order to set the plot up properly there is a lot of time devoted to introducing the characters and letting the reader know the dynamics between the inhabitants of the hotel.

I initially stuggled with the idea that this book was only told from one person's point of view- Jon Keller an American Historian. I'm used to books like this having break-out short chapters which provide news about the outside world but in The Last, the reader is as cut-off as the guests trapped within the hotel. Once I got used to this lack of knowledge, I found myself falling headfirst into the book barely coming up for air.

The murder mystery plot worked incredibly well against the post-apocalytpic backdrop and left me feeling increasingly on-edge as Jon circled nearer and nearer to uncovering the truth.

Despite the sci-fi nature of the this book, I can't say that reading it was particularly an escape from stresses of life. In fact, it was fairly uncomfortable at time how closely the book mirrored the political climate of the world currently. Every so often I had the stark realisation that this fictional catastrophy wasn't actually that far-fetched of an idea, which was incredibly unnerving.

As far as the characters, I'm not sure that I actually liked any of them, but then again I'm not sure any of us would be the best version of ourselves at the end of the world. Still, I invested in their stories and even shed a few tears for them. I wanted them to find a way to start rebuilding their lives and living happily.

The conclusion of the book tied up the murder mystery plot well, which I was pleased about. As I neared the end of the story I was concerned we were running out of pages to resolve that plot and it would have been easy to leave it unresolved.

If post-apocalytic dystopian reads are your thing I would definitely recommend The Last. It has a feel of the Walking Dead about it, but the writing is much more accomplished and subtle. It is a scarily believable imagining of what might happen to civilisation if a nuclear war broke out on this scale

This book started off with so much promise, the premise of a post apocolypic world, an isolated hotel with a dark past and a murderer in their midst. Sadly the pace was so slow and the characters so unengaging that I was unable to finish this book.

This novel is, on the face of it, a detective story in an unusual setting but it soon becomes so much more than that.
The story is narrated by Jon, an American academic attending a conference in an isolated hotel in Switzerland when a nuclear war breaks out and civilization changes. Some of the people at the hotel try to leave but a group remain behind and Jon, not knowing if his wife and children have survived, sets himself the task of writing about their experience and the back stories of those present in case his account should be found.
Not long after the bombs have fallen, as he and two members of the hotel staff are investigating the water tanks on the roof of the building, they find the body of a young girl whose death must be suspicious as she could not have got there by herself. Jon is tasked with investigating the murder in case the person responsible is still in the hotel.
At this point the book has the feel of a story in the mould of 'And Then There Were None' with a bit of 'Lord of the Flies' thrown in but it soon starts to pose so many questions that the murder becomes the backdrop rather than the main focus of the drama.
The group have no knowledge as to whether they are the only other survivors in the world - if so should they start thinking of 'repopulating' the planet. At one point there is a deeply unsettling conversation between three male characters as to whether the women should be compelled to be involved in such a programme were it to be decided upon.
The group is very disparate and the characters are varied both in their backgrounds and in their methods of dealing with the situation. Thrown into the mix are suicides, drug taking, casual sexual relationships, new and not so casual relationships and child minding arrangements. Although the lead up to the nuclear holocaust is never described in detail, the information that is given is a thinly veiled caricature of the Trump Presidency and there is a very unsettling moment in the story when a number of characters turn on one who admits voting for him as though the whole situation is her fault. They are clearly looking for someone to blame and it does make me wonder if I would react in the same way in similar circumstances.
There are many moments in the book where things are highlighted which I certainly had never considered. For example we are all so used to getting our news online now how would we cope if the internet just wasn't there? What sanction would we be prepared to countenance (and indeed carry out) on a member of the group accused (without proof) of a serious crime? What would we do if we were foraging for food and were attacked be former colleagues we had assumed were dead?
These are among many of the questions I found myself considering both during and after my reading of the novel which will certainly remain in the mind for a long time after completing it.
As the narrator is directly involved in the situation we have to assume that he is telling the truth in an objective fashion but some contradictions make even that questionable in places. In a nice touch Jon tells us that he is writing everything down in long hand so that it will not be lost if his computer battery can no longer be charged.
The ending is nicely done and there is some room for a sequel if the writer so wished.
Although the book is very unsettling and thought provoking I thoroughly enjoyed it and I highly recommend it both as a gripping story and a glimpse into how civilised people might react in an almost unimaginable situation.

Hanna Jameson's dystopian, apocalyptic mystery novel embodies our worst fears and nightmares with the current US political situation. It begins with the shocking details of nuclear war with weapons exploding in cities around the world, including Washington, Munich, London and Scotland. This is a story of the impact and terrifying repercussions that follow for the survivors and a locked room murder mystery set in a remote and isolated hotel in Switzerland. American historian, Jon Keller, is in a troubled marriage with Nadia that is heading towards separation, and has two daughters. Jon has travelled to Switzerland for a convention when the news breaks about the disturbing global events taking place, with many people leaving for the airport and rail stations. However, their journeys are pointless as transport links comes to a standstill and there is a communications blackout, with no internet access.

Amidst the panic, fear, paranoia, madness and mayhem, 20 strangers are left in the big hotel, a diverse mix of guests and staff, including the man with leadership qualities, Dylan, the hotel manager, Aussie barman, Nathan, a medical doctor, and an American history student that Jon finds himself getting close to. Water problems lead to the discovery of the body of a young woman in the water tank. Plagued by guilt for ignoring Nadia's last message, Jon finds salvation in investing his energies in investigating the murder despite others showing little interest. They feel there are greater concerns that face them with the collapse of the world as they know it. Jon documents what is happening, recording his experiences and events in his journal. Tensions, conflict and suspicions of each other rise to unbearable levels between the survivors as supplies run low. The survivors are also keen to ensure that their secrets do not emerge.

This is an astonishingly thought provoking novel that provides opportunities to reflect on what might be a real possibility in our contemporary world. Jameson's depiction of a strife ridden group of survivors feels desperately authentic, particularly as we are presented with aspects of the worst of humanity. In this bleak and unsettling read, the author provides a philosophical and human exploration of life and death, with ethical and moral dilemmas in a post-apocalyptic scenario. With sincere hopes that the outlined nightmare in this novel never come to pass, I found the focus on a group of survivors fascinating and horrifying as they turn on each other, whilst the murder mystery elements are suspenseful and gripping. A book guaranteed to make you think. Many thanks to Penguin UK for an ARC.

I really enjoyed reading this story about the end of the world after nuclear war. It was gripping and claustrophobic and very nicely done.

If you enjoy post apocalyptic fiction then this book adds to the premise with a murder mystery in a hotel. It’s The Shining meets Agatha Christie. A heady cocktail indeed but sadly it doesn’t quite fulfil its potential with a few too many characters to follow, and none worthy of this reader’s sympathies. That said, if a deserted hotel survivalist thriller is your bag, then this is the book for you.