The Last Man in Europe: A Novel

by Dennis Glover

Overview

This “riveting novel about Orwell’s last days” takes readers inside the renowned author’s mind as he creates his final dystopian masterpiece (New Statesman).

April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-three years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that within three winters will take his life, Orwell comes to see the book as his legacy—the culmination of a career spent fighting to preserve the freedoms which the wars and upheavals of the twentieth century have threatened. Completing the book is an urgent challenge, a race against death.

In this masterful novel, Dennis Glover explores the creation of Orwell’s classic work which defined the twentieth century for millions of readers worldwide—and has continued to prove its unnerving relevance in the twenty-first. Simultaneously a captivating drama, a unique literary excavation, and an unflinching portrait of a writer, The Last Man in Europe will change the way we understand both our enduringly Orwellian times and Orwell’s timeless masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468315929
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	231
Sales rank:	591,401
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dennis Glover earned his PhD in history from King’s College, Cambridge. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser, and speechwriter. He is the author of The Art of Great Speeches, Orwell’s Australia, and The Economy is Not a Society. The Last Man in Europe is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/01/2017
This first novel brings to life the final years of Eric Blair—better known by his pen name George Orwell—and the environment and global conditions that sparked the creation of his classic novel 1984. The story line centers on the author's world and his prescience in recognizing the dangers of the political and intellectual leanings of his time, revelations that he spins into his cautionary tale. The book opens with Orwell as a struggling writer without a set belief system and follows him through his experience in the Spanish Civil War and into notoriety via the allegorical work Animal Farm. But the real focus is his final novel. Sick from pulmonary tuberculosis and undergoing harrowing procedures, Orwell races to finish his story while it is still relevant. One of the strengths of this book is nonfiction author Glover's (Orwell's Australia) ability to transport readers to 1940s Europe, proving the author has a great eye for detail. VERDICT This engrossing, timely, and finely detailed first novel about the creation of a 20th-century literary masterpiece is a must-read for lovers of history, literature, or politics.—Laurel Tacoma, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA

Library Journal

This imaginative work is an unexpected treat for fans of George Orwell. The Barcelona scenes are especially memorable, cinematic in their brightness. The more you know of Orwell, the more you will enjoy it. This, finally, is the biography--even though a novel--that Orwell deserves.” —Thomas E. Ricks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the New York Times bestseller Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

'Dennis Glover has dared to burrow into the moral universe of George Orwell, there to look through his unblinking eyes upon the malevolence, vanity, cowardice and deceit that menace the potential for a decent society. The result is a story rivetingly told, not only of Orwell's insight and courage, but of his torments, his loves, his gut-wrenching struggles. Read this book to better know and understand an essential figure of the 20th century whose writing and example still speak to us with urgency.' – Don Watson, author of Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

'This is a novel about George Orwell and 1984, written uncannily in the style Orwell would have used if he had decided to write a novel about his own life. The result is a fascinating, compelling and, in the end, a deeply moving work, a wonderfully accurate and entirely unsentimental tribute to the political writer who grasped with greatest penetration the meaning of the European catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Glover’s Orwell is fully imagined and precisely understood. With The Last Man in Europe, a major new literary talent has been revealed.' – Robert Manne, author of The Mind of the Islamic State

From the Publisher

A quite astonishing achievement. This is a novel about George Orwell and1984, written uncannily in the style Orwell would have used if he had decided to write a novel about his own life. The result is a fascinating, compelling and, in the end, a deeply moving work, a wonderfully accurate and entirely unsentimental tribute to the political writer who grasped with greatest penetration the meaning of theEuropean catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Glover's Orwell is fully imagined and precisely understood. With The Last Man in Europe, a major new literary talent has been revealed.”

Robert Manne

Rivetingly told, not only of Orwell's insight and courage, but of his torments, his loves, his gut-wrenching struggles. Read this book to better know and understand an essential figure of the 20th century whose writing and example still speak to us with urgency.

Don Watson

Glover's ultimately successful book is . . . imagined reality, it is a character study. It’s a very moving one and it is handled with skill, without a dead note. We see him as Comstock, or Bowling and eventually Winston Smith. Quite soon we no longer see the device at all, absorbed, and are instead following him through a bombed-out Islington, a ruined Germany, an inhospitable Jura, we’re with him at the wartime BBC and seeing spies everywhere as if reading a rather fast moving drama . . . A vivid picture is built up, an entertaining story of how an artist’s experiences and evolving ideas make it into the work we read . . . It is a novel and we all know how it ends. I felt after finishing, I’d seen Orwell from another angle. It is touching and sad but those things hold their own enjoyment in literature.

Jason Crimp

Dennis Glover'sThe Last Man in Europefictionalizes the creation of Orwell's seminal work, depicting the small moments throughout the writer's life that eventually culminated in the book's genesis and completion. Orwell in many ways worked himself to death writing1984, and Glover's fabulous book shows why.”

Shelf Awareness

Enthralling . . . a sprawling but compact recreation of Orwell’slastyears and his writing ofthebook, with impressionistic glimpses oftheevents which shapedthenovel . . .Glover convincingly enters Orwell’s often-prickly psyche, documentingtheheartbreaks and betrayals which created his unique and prophetic world view. . .TheLastManinEurope(thetitle itself is significant, as it wastheworking title forNineteen Eighty-Four) is a unique and thought-provoking work, intellectually challenging and emotionally rich. It will likely compel readers back toNineteen Eighty-Four— never a bad thing — and force them to take a look attheworld around themselves, to consider warnings unheeded.”

The Toronto Star

This imaginative work is an unexpected treat for fans of George Orwell. The Barcelona scenes are especially memorable, cinematic in their brightness. The more you know of Orwell, the more you will enjoy it. This, finally, is the biography—even though a novel—that Orwell deserves.

Thomas E. Ricks

In his highly compelling, deeply researched novelThe Last Man in Europe—the title Orwell almost gaveNineteen Eighty Four—Dennis Glover tells the dramatic story of an author, in the twilight of his life, composing the greatest of his literary works.”

The National Book Review

There are just a few writers whose work is so distinctive, definitive, and important their very name describes a whole world, like 'Orwellian.' Dennis Glover has written a novel that captures George Orwell as he began to write the book he saw as the culmination of all he'd learned in a bloody century about tyranny, fear, valor, and love.

Scott Simon - NPR's Weekend Edition