The Last Day
The gripping must-read thriller by the Sunday Times bestselling author
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3.8 • 48 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Pre-order Andrew Hunter Murray's brilliantly entertaining new thriller A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering coming May 2024!
Half the world is in darkness. Only she can save the light . . . the post-apocalyptic bestselling read.
'A brilliant near-future thriller and a really cracking read' Richard Osman
'Will keep you gripped to the very last page' C.J. Tudor
'Wonderful ... the best future-shock thriller for years.' Lee Child
'A stunningly original thriller' Harlan Coben
'A beautifully realised and thought-provoking thriller' The Times
'Intriguing and unusual' Sunday Times
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2059. The world has stopped turning.
One half suffers an endless frozen night; the other, nothing but burning sun.
Only in a slim twilit region between them can life survive.
In an isolationist Britain clinging on in the twilight zone, scientist Ellen Hopper receives a letter from a dying man. It contains a powerful and dangerous secret.
One that those in power will kill to conceal . . .
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'Reminiscent of Robert Harris's high-concept conspiracy thrillers' Financial Times
'I read this hungrily ... A fabulous achievement.' Stephen Fry
'Inventive, richly detailed world-building' Telegraph
'A tantalizing, suspenseful odyssey of frustration, deceit, treachery, torture, hope, despair and ingenious sleuthing' Washington Post
'A taut, thrilling runaround' Guardian
'A brilliant debut ... Fans of Robert Harris will love it' Daily Express
'To say it's gripping is an understatement' Sara Pascoe
'Murray has crafted something original ... an interesting new twist on a post-apocalyptic tale.' Kirkus
'Downright impossible to stop reading.' Booklist
'Dark, believable and brilliantly written' Jenny Colgan
'I couldn't put this book down!' Christina Dalcher
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murray's impressive eye for detail compensates for the scientifically preposterous premise of his debut. When a "rogue" white dwarf star passed dangerously close to Earth, it left the planet half scorched in sunlight and half frozen in darkness, with humanity barely hanging on in the dim zone between the extremes. Forty years after the disaster, dubbed "the Stop," Britain, in the middle zone, has descended into fascism. Depressed scientist Dr. Ellen Hopper conducts oceanic research on a rig in the North Sea, despite feeling her work is pointless. When Hopper is summoned to the deathbed of her Oxford mentor, Edward Thorne, a government scientist responsible for the deaths of countless refugees after the Stop, she catches wind of a secret that could spell further disaster for humankind. To save what's left of the world, Hopper launches an investigation into the government secret, rediscovering her hope for humanity along the way. Murray's despairing characters are convincing and his descriptions of the broken Earth are vivid, but his apocalypse is too conceptually contrived to be believable. Readers will easily invest in Hopper's mission, but will struggle to buy into Murray's vision of the future.
Customer Reviews
Interesting but…
An interesting idea, but the plot basically involves the main character (at different times) burning a total of four letters without reading them, then spending the rest of the book trying to figure out what was in those letters. The dystopia portrayed is quite interesting though.