Last Exit

by Max Gladstone

Overview

Fresh from winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Max Gladstone weaves elements of American myth—the muscle car, the open road, the white-hatted cowboy—into Last Exit, a deeply emotional tale where his characters must find their own truths if they are to survive.

Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel to alternate realities and battle the black rot that threatened to unmake each world. Zelda was the warrior; Ish could locate people anywhere; Ramon always knew what path to take; Sarah could turn catastrophe aside. Keeping them all connected: Sal, Zelda’s lover and the group's heart.

Until their final, failed mission, when Sal was lost. When they all fell apart.

Ten years on, Ish, Ramon, and Sarah are happy and successful. Zelda is alone, always traveling, destroying rot throughout the US.

When it boils through the crack in the Liberty Bell, the rot gives Zelda proof that Sal is alive, trapped somewhere in the alts.

Zelda’s getting the band back together—plus Sal’s young cousin June, who has a knack none of them have ever seen before.

As relationships rekindle, the friends begin to believe they can find Sal and heal all the worlds. It’s not going to be easy, but they’ve faced worse before.

But things have changed, out there in the alts. And in everyone's hearts.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466826144
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/08/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	411,916
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

MAX GLADSTONE is the author of the Craft Sequence, a unique series of critically acclaimed fantasy novels. He is also lead writer of the fantasy eBook serial Bookburners, and the author of numerous short stories.
Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award–winning author, MAX GLADSTONE, has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Last Exit, Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This Is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/08/2021

College students discover they can manipulate the inherent uncertainties of reality to step into alternate universes in the brilliant latest from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gladstone (This Is How You Lose the Time War, written with Amal El-Mohtar). Heroine Zelda and her friends use this “knack” to search for a better world, one “where history turned out different.” Instead, they find the rot, a hungry evil that devours every world it touches—and, in a terrible miscalculation, Zelda’s lover, Sal, is lost to the rot. Ten years later, Zelda’s on the road, alone, and working to stamp out the rot wherever it creeps into her world. When Sal’s 17-year-old cousin, June, demands answers about what really happened to Sal, Zelda takes June into an “alt”—and discovers that Sal, or whatever she’s become, is coming home. Now Zelda must bring her old friends back together to travel to the Crossroads, where worlds meet, in hopes of sealing off the rot forever. Gladstone weaves magic and mathematics in vivid and poetic prose. There’s a wonderful diversity of characters and relationships, with deep insight on how the characters’ differing traumas and marginalizations influence what they want out of the alternate worlds. The result blends fantasy, horror, and science fiction to produce a stunning, insightful novel that wants a better world just as much as its protagonists do. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Last Exit is Max Gladstone’s best work yet, a novel carved by hand out of salt and rock and bone, a road broken clean through a dying country’s heart. This is what the Great American Novel wishes it could be: honest, furious, in love.”—Amal El-Mohtar, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author

“How far would you go to save the world? Max Gladstone’s Last Exit answers resoundingly with an epic homage and powerful challenge to modern fantasy. What a stunning ride!”—Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award winning author of Updraft and the Gemworld series

“It's strange and wondrous and chilling and creepy and beautiful all at once. A book fit for our end-of-times times.”—Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author

“[A] deliriously strange novel of alternate universes and dysfunctional explorers. This gloriously metaphysical adventure will stick with you long after you return to the so-called real world.”—Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders

“Gives us the claustrophobia of impending collapse without losing the glimmer of hope. A wild ride into the darkness hiding under everyday life, like Gaiman’s Neverwhere with interstates and America instead of London and the Underground.”—Django Wexler, author of Ashes of the Sun

“Brilliant...a wonderful diversity of characters and relationships, with deep insight on how the characters’ differing traumas and marginalizations influence what they want. Blends fantasy, horror, and science fiction to produce a stunning, insightful novel that wants a better world just as much as its protagonists do.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Thoughtful, action-packed, terrifying, and hopeful all at once, and has true, complicated friendships, found family, and queer love at its core. It’s an epic story with a complex, believable cast that asks the reader what it would truly take to find a world that’s better than our own.”—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher