Last One at the Party

A virus known as 6DM — 'Six Days Maximum' — sweeps across the globe, killing almost everyone within a week of infection. When the dying is done, one unremarkable woman discovers she is, impossibly, the last person alive in Britain.

Suddenly free of the job, the marriage, and the endless small compromises that defined her old life, she has the entire ruined country to herself — its abandoned mansions, its unguarded luxuries, its terrible silence. But survival alone, with no one left to see or need her, forces her to confront who she really is beneath the roles she once played for everyone else.

Told with dark humor and unexpected tenderness, Bethany Clift's Last One at the Party is a post-apocalyptic story less about the end of the world than about a woman finally, belatedly, learning how to live.