I requested this for consideration for Book Riot's All the Books podcast for its release date. After sampling several books out this week, I decided to go with a different book for my review.

This book had such an interesting concept and incredibly gorgeous writing. I just got a bit lost in the timeline in parts as it was confusing to who was narrating but apart from that I did really enjoy the abstract poetical writing and storyline

The Last Sane Woman is about a struggling artist discovering a box of letters written by a famous potter. As she reads the letters, she attempts to understand her meaning and purpose in life.
This novel forced me to pay attention and reread it to ensure I comprehended every chapter. I believe a reader will need to be in the right mood to pick this one up. With that said, I wouldn't recommend it as a beach read. However, literary fiction fans looking for a challenge will enjoy this one.

As so many others have said, it’s clear this book was written by a poet. It made me feel many things; but also, it feels like it delighted more in language than meaning. (Which, of course, is perfectly valid.) I wanted to know more: how did the potter die? It feels like the book advances multiple possibilities—which is … ok, but not satisfying. I think Nicola’s frustration after she finished reading the letters is my frustration too.

The good? The story carried me along. Donna was a really interesting character, and Nicola a pretty good anti-hero. I also quite liked the form of the novel; I first tried to read the DRC on my Kindle, which worked not at all as there was no way to distinguish between POVs. Switching to NetGalley’s app fixed that, and *The Last Sane Woman* became a much more legible read. I was also very much on board with the feminist message: the Feminist Assembly, archives for female artists, disappearing women artists, and all of that. I just feel it wasn’t the main point of the book—but am still somewhat bewildered about what that would have been. (PS. I did read a review that clarifies that in connection with the title, and I will go down that rabbit hole. I’m just a little frustrated that meanings like that were not more accessible for this reader.)

Thank you to Verso and to NetGalley. I will no doubt be pondering for a while, trying to work out just what I read, and what I was supposed to get from it.

I'm sorry but this really wasn't for me. I gave it one star because I finished it but it gave me a headache in the process.

I try to look for something good in every book I read but I was struggling from the beginning with this. In fact it took me four attempts to get past the first 30 pages. I simply couldn't get a grip on what it was trying to tell me.

The story appears simple - a woman, Nicola Long, is searching for purpose and comes across letters written by a potter - Donna Drennan - to her friend, Susan Baddesley. All we know about Donna is that she had some mild success at the start of her career but then struggled and finally ended her own life. The recipient of the letters had given them to an archive of/for women (The Feminist Assembly).

And that's all I can tell you. The prose rambles around from person to person without any discernible breaks so you become bewildered (until a name is mentioned) as to who you are reading about. (Maybe that was the point?) The metaphors come thick and fast at times and are often totally nonsensical ("chattering like a tin can"?)

As far as I could see none of the women did anything particularly useful they just complained about not knowing what to do. Donna and Nicola both seem to squander opportunities and ramble about living here and there and wondering why they aren't successful. They both drove me mad with their apathy. You barely get to know Susan except to learn that she stayed in touch with Donna and kept her letters.

As I say I do try to find something good but I failed. Mea culpa. I also never worked out who the "last sane woman" was. Certainly not I by the end of this book.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Verso Books for the advance review copy.

There was something about the book blurb that really called out to me; the idea of getting to know an artist through letters just sounded sublime.

It could have been the fact that this was an unfinished e-galley, but it was not an easy read. The story shifts back and forth in perspective between present-day Nicola, past unnamed potter (who does get named somewhere in the middle of the book), and past/present Sarah, the recipient of the potter's letters. The formatting (which I can only assume will be clearer in the final version) made it difficult to distinguish between the three POVs and got quite confusing.

There are a multitude of comparisons and contrasts between the lives of all three that adds to the complexity...but also the beauty of the story. There are a lot of lovely passages and all the angst and self-doubt that makes this such an interesting study of these three different, yet similar women.

Unfortunately, after all the beautiful writing, the ending absolutely lost me. I have no idea what point the author was trying to make with it. And I think some people might actually appreciate how open-ended Regel left things, but I felt extreme frustration to be left hanging.

Final verdict: This will definitely appeal to literary fiction readers and it worth a read

you know when a book just WORKS for you? i devoured this - started it during a morning off from work, and nearly finished it during a power outage that night. something about it just absolutely clicked with me and i loved it. thank you to verso and netgalley for the digital copy! i’ve already preordered a physical copy for my bookshelf 🫡

the last sane woman weaves together the lives of 3 different women. we have present-day nicola, who is feeling lost and directionless after studying art at university; donna, a sculptor creating in the 1970s and 1980s and drifting from opportunity to opportunity; and donna’s best friend susan, leading a conventional life with a house, husband, and baby. when nicola discovers letters that donna wrote to susan in a feminist art archive, she becomes obsessed with how similar her and donna are.

the writing here is DELICIOUS. so rich and detailed and it’s evident that regel is a poet-turned-novelist, but in the best way possible. the combination of scenes from each of the women’s lives mixed with excerpts of the letters that donna wrote to susan made the book compulsively readable. there is a web of other people that the three main characters are connected to that made the reading experience so immersive. it explores female friendship, the issue of finding your purpose in life, the struggle of whether or not to live a traditional domestic life, and the way that female artists are erased from history.

think of this as the contemporary counterpart to lisa tuttle’s my death (one of my other favorite reads of the year) but hold the metaphysical craziness. there’s that same thread of finding an artist that you feel so connected to, that you feel like you are one and the same. the picture of donna that is painted by her letters has a lot of gaps that nicola is unable to fill in, and those gaps allow nicola to really project herself onto donna, but as readers we get to fill in some of the blanks through the scenes from donna’s life.

i thought the way this played with form and explored the ideas it presents was so engaging, and i’m obsessed with regel’s writing style. can’t wait to see what she does next!

*3.5

Centering a female artist at wits end, she discovers another female artist 30 years her senior, dead, through letters that focus on art, productivity, all in and around the female body.

Funny. Odd. Spirited. It's a long stretch of a character study in trying to place the what matters most between past and present, all to realize we're all going through the same shit, just at different times.

Interesting and bold. I'm not sure if it holds up as it warrants a reread, but it's Woolfian in its attempt, but lackluster due to being a classic DWM (in a time we are spoiled with too many of this genre) with a writing style that doesn't know how to move from poetry to the novel form.

The Last Sane Woman reads like a novel written by a poet, which is what it is. There are long, poetic passages, sometimes-confusing changes in POV and an innovative form that brings disparate storylines together at the end. I had to re-read the first 100 pages when I found myself confused by the number of characters and their one-offs. I kept notes the second time through and was able to successfully orient myself to the point where I felt comfortable. That’s not to say that everything was clear to me. The format of the book is such that the storylines wax and wane and the reader is swept along with the current. The main character – Nicola – is a ceramics potter who finds herself artistically stymied and turns to the letters of another artist (written 30 years earlier and ending in the artist’s suicide) to try to find motivation. The confluence of the storylines leaves an ending that begs the reader to stand back and consider the main themes of female friendship and the role of female artists in the art world. I was a little too confused to give this book top marks, but I enjoyed reading it and discovering the similarities between the two artists’ stories. I would recommend this to women who are interested in the art world and who like a poetic bent to their prose.

I would give the plot a 5 star review. Unfortunately, I personally struggled with the writing style. I found it difficult to follow and often had the feeling of falling out of the story. That said, I really loved that characters and thought that that plot was original and intriguing.

Thank you NetGalley and Verso books for an ARC of this book! “The Last Sane Woman” was definitely one of the most challenging books I’ve read in a while, but it was quite rewarding. This is a book that will make you think and break down plot and characters to its essential theme. The structure of the narrative is occasionally hard to keep track of, but the lyrical writing style kept me engaged throughout the reading process.
The novel follows Nicola, a recent graduate from art school as she finds a box of letters that once belonged to another female artist who has since died. Nicola is struck by the similarities of her situation with that of the older artist. From the reader traces Nicola’s processing of her own loss of direction and apprehension for the future.
With the narrative seamlessly blending the past with the present, the reading experience required a high degree of attention and effort to ensure I understood what was going on. Yet, this blended storytelling is essential to identifying the similarities between these two stories, and in some ways I wish I let go of trying to pick up every detail and just read with the flow.

Looping across timelines, The Last Sane Woman finds Nicola, a lonely, possibly depressed fine arts graduate, who spends most of her time reading archived letters from a 70's ceramicist to her friend who leads a more conventional life.


Gradually Nicola becomes more and more obsessed with the archive and her semblance of a life begins to unravel. as she gets closer to the end of the correspondence will she like where they end?.

Captivating and evocative.

I really didn't know what to expect with this book, but I really enjoyed it once I started reading. It took me a little while to get into the story, mostly because the way it is written, it took me a little while to get my head around who the various characters are. Mostly because it jumps around a little bit, but a good part of that was down to my tired brain.
This is a very good read and not one that I was really expecting.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through NetGalley. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own and given voluntarily.

The writing style of this book reminded me a bit of “Mrs. Dalloway”, of which I was not a fan. It seemed to me a bit bland and staccato, while being confusing at the same time and I just could not get into it. Perhaps I am just not the right audience, but this book didn’t cut it for me. Thank you to NetGalley for the advance read copy.

I adore this book so much, I almost stopped reading on Netgalley several times in order to wait for a finished copy because I wanted to go be able to go through and underline all the incredible sentences but I kept needing to come back and now I'll be waiting for it to come out so I can read it again. This book feels very real in its depiction of a forgotten female potter, the friend she wrote too throughout her career and the young woman finding the letters years later, and seems like an important reminder that the grand success stories we are used to seeing aren't the most important and the way history is recorded falls so far short. This feels like a rediscovered classic more than a new novel (an amazing thing), with shades of Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble.

Honestly, I think it’s a me problem!! I thought I was going to absolutely love this but I don’t think I was in the right mood to read this. It’s quite slow and very character-focused, which typically I’m all for, but this one just fell flat. It would also get a bit muddled and confusing with the lack of quotation marks and frequent narrative/timeline shifts in the middle of the chapters. There was some really nice, sublime writing but it also edged on being too poetic.

I think this will be a big hit for a more niche group, and possibly if I re-visited at a different time, but it wasn’t quite for me.

Thank you to NegGalley and Verso Fiction for the ARC.

beautiful, inspiring artistic epistolary novel. I want to know more about all of these characters, and that's one of the signs of a great book, leave the reader wanting more. Nicola is so interesting and the way she delves into the letters and abruptly alters her life around reading them is so relatable.

One of those perplexing books that makes my mind explode is The Last Sane Woman: the structure reveals the theme, the untidy yet realistic people reveal something real about humanity at that precise moment, and the significance emerges as a revelation in the wake of it all. The debut novelist Hannah Regel, who is best known as a poet, writes with an impressionist's sensibility. She includes a great deal of truth about women in her writing, including how they present themselves, their friendships, and their place in the arts. Long passages read as inappropriate metaphors, and close-up details become hazy until one takes a step back and considers the whole. At first glance, this appears to be the narrative of Nicola, a young ceramicist who is feeling lost and has just graduated from art school. Almost at random, she asks a nonprofit archive of women artists whether they have any information on women who have struggled with "making things." A box of letters written by a female potter who committed suicide in the 1980s without leaving a lasting legacy is given to Nicola by the archivist, and she is instantly enthralled with the biography that this one-sided correspondence reveals between the anonymous potter (who always signs her name in “xx” kisses) and the enigmatic “Susan,” to whom she reveals everything. As Nicola reads more, she starts to see parallels between the book and her own life and career. This causes her to become anxious because she thinks she might be about to solve a riddle. That is only the surface story, though. (Although I don't really think of what comes next as a spoiler, please be advised that I liked learning these things on my own.)

As I mentioned earlier, this novel's structure is not simple. Scenes from Susan's point of view alternate with Nicola's contemporary London life, passages she reads from the letters that abruptly change to the potter going about her own life in the London of thirty to forty years ago, and Nicola's reaction to the letters of her freewheeling friend (whom she does name for the reader) as she deals with putting her own artistic aspirations on hold in order to become a young wife and mother.

This is, above all, a feminist narrative about a woman artist who went unnamed and was lost to history. It tells the story of what she really accomplished, how she told her closest friend about it, how the friend used her own experiences to interpret events, and how telling these lost tales can inspire a new generation. This work may not be to everyone's taste, but it was surely to mine because the format does echoes the potter's unconventional creations.

The Last Sane Woman

This book was so much more than I expected. It’s a story of womanhood, navigating the world as a starving artist, and the struggle to feel known and recognized. I think the heart of the story can be summarized best by a line from one of the main characters, captured in a letter to her best friend: “I feel I am all determination and no potential.”

The storytelling mode is immersive and unique; it goes back and forth from the present day, from the perspective of an aimless twenty-something artist named Nicola, who finds herself reading an archive of letters exchanged in the 70s by a potter, Donna, and her best friend, Susan. Nicola finds herself relating to Donna, drawing parallels between their lives and striving to create a legacy for her many years later, but she will come to accidentally cross a few lines, leading to Susan’s re-entry into the present day story and leaving a thought-provoking ending.

Overall, the quality of writing and richness of detail in this story are incredible. It’s been a while since I’ve read something so lively and lyrical. However, I did find it a bit difficult to get into and challenging to maintain focus at times due to the lack of attribution tags in dialogue, and the absence of indication of when the timelines change. There were several times throughout the book when I couldn’t figure out who was talking or whether the event was taking place in the past versus the present. But besides these issues, I can’t say anything bad about this book. Regel presents a gorgeously rendered world that consistently captures the nuances of being an artist and a woman. 4/5 stars.

How long do we hold on to our dreams? Some let go when they “grow up”, move on, and never look back. Many (most?) others, let go though followed by eternal questioning, wondering, longing, and often regret. And then there are some, relatively few, that don’t let go, continue to persevere, manage the doubters, trudge on- for better or for worse.

We often hear about those who eventually become wildly successful, defying the odds, “overnight sensations” after years, decades of struggle. Hannah Regel isn’t focused on these spectacular stories in her striking debut, “The Last Sane Woman”. Instead, she is interested in the struggle, especially artists’ struggles, mostly especially female artists’ struggles. She is interested in the quotidian encounters, the daily steps forward, and constant setbacks.

Regel gives us a lot to keep track of. There are many characters, all with subtle nuance and vital information. There are multiple time periods and settings that can quickly weave in and out. There are those letters that bear close reading. Finally there is the language, the language of a poet. “The Last Sane Woman” is not a novel to rush through, rather one to savor.

We all harbor dreams; we all house a piece of the artist inside. We love to read about, experience, and enjoy the work of writers, painters, film makers, musicians, photographers, dancers, instrumentalists, singers. Sculptors have always seemed to hold a special space - even a little less “grounded in reality” in order to commit to their work. “The Last Sane Woman” is all about women that take on that challenge . You will not soon forget them.

Thanks to Verso and NetGalley for the eARC.