‘Last one at the party’ review
So this may be one of my fav books this year.
It’s not for everyone; it’s a book about a virus that supposedly wipes out the world except from the main character and even mentions the 2020 pandemic, which was mentioned with humour. I know a lot of people don’t like reading about virus’ as it’s so real right now, but I like to watch and read about viruses as it helps me deal with what we’re currently going through because they’re always described as way worse in fiction. It shows how strong we can be when we least expect it and how we take how we’re living now (electricity, heat, takeaways etc) for granted and does it in a way which is entertaining. There are also points where we see her ‘past life’ and all the people who are important to her and this shapes her character development beautifully.
I was accepted to read this early copy by @netgalley @beth_writes_stuff and I will be buying myself a copy when it comes out (Feb 4th)

I know some people cannot read these stories of killer viruses wiping out the population at the current time, as Covid-19 sweeps across the world. However, this book does not focus on the virus and its cause and spread, but rather on what happens next. The virus is called 6DM - standing for 'six days maximum' - the time you have once you contract it before you die.

One woman survives - we don't know her name. Living in London, this is her story of her struggle to come to terms with her new existence, to find survivors if she can, and make something of her life. However, neatly woven into the story is her past - her failing marriage, her infidelity, her friendships, her breakdowns, her dreams.

It is funny, horrific and verym very sad as we all identify with her as a human being.

Well written, entertaining and a jolly good read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Devastating,  hilarious and a spectacular journey of self discovery. A story of finding  love and strength when you discover you are all alone in the world.

"‘Fuck You!’ Those are the very last words that I spoke to another living person. If I had known that they would be my last, I would have chosen them a bit more carefully. Something erudite, with a bit more drama."

And so begins our journey and what an exhilarating rollercoaster of a ride that is

I genuinely thought this book would increase my anxiety about the current pandemic but it engrossed my thoughts abd locked out the world. It is riveting and the character is just like you or me. She's no survivalist and it makes you wonder what on earth you'd do.

At times I sobbed for humanity, for all the pain, the sadness and for her plight.  But then I'd laugh at some of her actions thinking whoa that's so true and you had the bravery to voice it! I bet you think so too.

The author has thought of the real horrors of a pandemic and its not the done to death zombies that we have seen so many times before. Some of the hurdles here are petrifying yet I believed fully in their possibility and each one had me terrified. I'd never wish to face them, not even with an army,  nevertheless each test she faces helps her grow.

But we also, through flashbacks see who she was before the pandemic and these sections really resonated with me. How many of us mould ourselves to fit, to match, to look right. Do we ever really know who we are or have we spent so long trying to be what's expected of us. Do our chanel handbags matter if there is no-one there to see them?

The writing in this book is incredible, it's gritty and oh so real. The pace had my pulse racing and until I read how it finished, I was unable to move from the sofa. Even then, I was sad it had ended.

This story is a blockbuster of a novel, wrought with emotions and action and although it is deeply sad at times it is also a tale of beauty and of how love is always there.

Highly Recommended

This is the second eARC of a pandemic dystopia I have read during some kind of lockdown which does feel a little too close to comfort in many, many ways. But like The End of Men, the pandemic in this book has consequences far exceeding even those of Covid-19. Unlike the End of Men, the current situation is referenced in the book, I suspect at copy editing stage as the author writes in her introduction that when the book was conceived, written and accepted, the events of 2020 were yet to unfold.

The pandemic, 6DM, has cut through humanity remorselessly. No one knows how infection is spread, but they do know that every infected person dies within six days, often painfully. And everyone gets infected. The UK government closes the borders and holds it off for a few weeks, but once it finds its ways onto these shores it takes no time to spread. In the end all humanity can do is concede, suicide pills freely available to everyone so the population has a chance to die without doing so in days of agonising pain. But one woman doesn't get infected. Is she immune, did the horrific three day hangover she endured at the start of the pandemic expel it from her body? There are no research scientists to investigate, all she knows is that everybody she knows is dead and she is alone in a city, a country, a world of corpses.

This is a story of survival, more, what it's like to survive despite the odds. The narrator is a relatable everywoman. She isn't outdoorsy, doesn't own a smallholding, can't build a bivouac. She lives in a city, works in an office, hates to drive, can barely cook. So how will she manage when she is the only person left alive? To start with she shields herself from reality with excess - luxurious hotels, binges in Harrods foodhall, drugs, alcohol. But then comes the question. What makes a life worth clinging on to? Would she better just ending it all now? A road trip across the UK brings hardship, some dark reckonings of the soul and the realisation of how unfit for survival she really is, especially as with no other humans, she has slipped a long way down the food chain...

Last One at the Party is compulsively readable and fast paced, begging the question of every reader, what would you do if it was you? Would you take the tempting suicide pill or would you hang on? Where would you live, how would you survive, how would you stop yourself going mad with loneliness? The whole country is yours, every castle, mansion, luxury penthouse, designer outfit - if you can get past the dead bodies, the feral animals and birds and make sure you don't get ill or injured. And what does any of that matter when there's no one to impress or share them with? I would have loved a slightly less ambiguous ending, invested as I was in the book, but other than that, highly recommended.

I read this book through Netgalley and I'm still trying to work out what my actual thoughts are!

It's a dystopian, set years after Coronavirus. A new virus has emerged that kills you within 6 days. It's actually very realistic, very thought provoking and the entire time i was reading it, i kept thinking.... This could actually happen!!!

I really loved the main character but there were a lot of questions left unanswered... Why did she not catch the virus??? And the ending of the book LEFT SOOO MANY PLOT HOLES that i had to rate it 3 stars.

I would definitely recommend to reas it. Its gruesome, but SO realistic and its a worse case scenario, i feel, of what could actually happen!

This is the second eerily prescient book I have read about a global pandemic (the first was the End of Men) and they are both equally brilliant. I especially like how the heroine is not particularly special or well equipped to handle the end of the world as we know it, and has her own demons but manages to find a way through. This resonated with me so much more than any number of protagonists who manage to defeat impossible odds. I also liked how hedonistic she was, sometimes in response to catastrophe you have to party!

Bethany Clift seems to have come up with the idea of this novel while driving home and getting lost in the middle of nowhere. The story is about a woman being the sole survivor of a virus that possibly wiped out the rest of the world. As the author explains in a preface, the first draft was ready in 2019, a few months before the world received the first reports of a new virus in China. In January 2020, her sister joked that the novel was coming true. The rest is history (actually, it’s still present, alas).

The idea behind this book is not new. ‘The Stand’ by Stephen King for instance, or a TV series like ‘The Walking Dead’, basically does the same: picturing how what is left of the human race tries to survive a pandemic. The difference is that Clift doesn’t bring a bunch of survivors with varying skills together in an attempt to rebuild stuff. The nameless protagonist of this novel hasn’t got that many skills, which is probably much more realistic. Most of us don’t know how to restart a power plant, don’t know which berries and mushrooms are safe to eat, don’t know how to kick-start a car without ignition key, don’t know how to set a broken limb, etc. The woman in this book doesn’t know most of these things either, and struggles to survive. She also has to fight loneliness and other emotional issues, resulting from not finding other survivors. This all makes this a very believable story.

Things I liked most about this book:

a) It’s not only about the aftermath of the pandemic. Most of the chapters have some of that, but also contain a lot of flashbacks in which the woman tells us something about what happened before. She doesn’t only talk about the last month before everything collapsed, but also speaks of the years before, and goes deeper into how her life has been (career, friends, emotional issues).

b) On top of other emotions, there is humour. It distinguishes us from other living species, so I liked it a lot that this aspect of humanity survived the pandemic. And very important: it was good humour. One example that made me laugh, after the woman finds a hotel with electricity, booze and a working TV set with on demand movies:

<blockquote>“I got drunk, got horny (yes, it’s weird, but I am sure there are lots, or rather were lots, of studies about how death and sex are linked) and spent an afternoon watching nothing but porn. At least, I planned to spend an afternoon watching nothing but porn, but, after a couple of hours when I just couldn’t face masturbating again, I got bored. When I found myself starting to analyse the plot holes rather than anatomical ones, I turned it off.”</blockquote>

c) There are cliffhangers. With them, Clift makes you often curious and you keep on reading.

Things I didn’t like:

There is not much to tell here. Nearing the end, it started to drag on a little bit but not to an extend that it became annoying. The author ended the book just in time to avoid that. It’s an interesting ending by the way. Kept me wondering if there is more to come someday.

To wrap up: this is a well written, very realistic book about surviving a pandemic with nobody to talk to and to share things with. It’s gripping and makes you think about how dependent we have become of technology and the skills of others to provide for us.

What would you do if you were the lone survivor of a plague that wiped out all of civilisation? Well that’s what our main character is trying to figure out after miraculously surviving the 6DM (Six Days Maximum) plague. It is a pandemic that started in a small town in America where upon infection, a person has six days maximum, before succumbing to death via organ failure. There are no easy deaths here, everyone dies painfully, and there is no hope of recovery. The virus quickly makes its way around the world, decimating societies in its wake, but much like Typhoid Mary, our main character is seemingly immune to the virus, finds herself desperately seeking other survivors whilst trying to figure out if life is really worth living when you are one your own.

I am not going to lie, reading this book in the middle of a pandemic was a bit weird, made weirder still by the author’s references to coronavirus and the ‘mistakes of 2020’. Most people don’t really know how to survive on your own, especially when the rest of nature has continued as normal. Maybe if you are Bear Grylls you would have some idea of how to chase away wild animals, find shelter, grow your own food and find clean water, but for most us, survival relies on those around us. And so for the author to tell of an ‘ordinary’ woman with no previous survival skills, made for quite a fascinating read, especially as the author does not hide away from the mental health implications of being a survivor.

I did feel like some of the writing dragged a little in the middle, but overall I found the story to be very engrossing in both plot and character development. There are quite a few twists to keep the reader on their toes and although the story is quite tragic, it does have quite a dark humour to it as well. I really hope the author keeps the note at the beginning, as it hooked me straight away and offers a lot of context to the story.

Reading this book during a pandemic seemed a bit on the nose at first, but the book gripped me from the start.
Following our protagonist through her journal, and flashes back to her life before 6DM was a wild, and profound ride.
In this book a global virus has killed nearly every single person on earth. Imagine waking up alone in London, surrounded by dead people in their houses, on the streets, in churches etc. She starts sight seeing and tasting the
"high" life, which makes sense. Because who would want to be surrounded by that much death, sober.
We follow her journey through England, breaking into cars/houses/stores etc. I had a field day mentally pillaging big warehouse stores for items.
The book asks bigger questions on who we are, what we need, how we feel being an employee, a wife, a girlfriend and a daughter.
Some bits of the book drag a tiny bit, but overall it's well written and hops back from "now" to earlier parts of her life.

This story was weird in the best ways.

3.5 (almost 4) stars.

If you’re sipping your tea right now and thinking, hmm, I’d really like a quirky read. This is it.

It’s the kind of odd deadpan humour that is quintessentially British - and I LOVE it. I thirst for the sarcasm and wit that this book held in the plenty.

The story is one I picked up mostly out of morbid curiosity. If you’ve read the description you know it focuses on a young woman who has against all odds become the sole survivor of a pandemic.

With Boris right now, I wouldn’t mind becoming that gal for a few days.

And weirdly- even in a pandemic ourselves- this was a kind of uplifting read?

Don’t get me wrong, there are darker aspects of loss, but the humour in this book was warming my cold, pandemic heart. (And making me thankful for what we do have.)

Now, I realise the timing of this book probably wasn’t what the author had foreseen, and the explanation at the beginning of the book made me smile. As someone with family working Covid wards, with family who have been hospitalised- I could still fully enjoy the humour and writing of this book. In fact it made me laugh out loud at multiple points. So to the author- I’m greatly glad you chose to publish this with all matters considered. It’s made me laugh constantly, and truly is a brilliant, uplifting read.

The reasons I marked it down was purely because of the storyline. The progression of someone alone- even with flash backs, and plot twists later on- becomes a slightly drawn out feat. I felt like the aspect works in films to a degree, but in a book, it becomes reliant on twists and shocks that weren’t in this story much (until nearer the end)

I would recommend this book. It’s a truly intriguing read.

Thank you to the publisher for supplying me with an ARC copy of this book.

I really enjoyed this book. If I were to compare this to another book. I would say that it is the British version of station eleven. This is the first pandemic book I enjoyed in a while. I think because it was less about the breakdown of society and more about surviving. If liking the main character is important to you then I would be hesitant about this book. The ending was abrupt but satisfying. I read the book in one sitting.