The Last Man

Set at the end of the twenty-first century, The Last Man follows a small circle of friends as a plague sweeps the globe and, one by one, empties it of people. It is Shelley’s most ambitious book and her most personal one, written after she had already buried her husband and two of her children.

Why Consider This One

Where Frankenstein is tight and propulsive, The Last Man is sprawling and elegiac. Shelley widens her lens from one man’s mistake to the slow-motion end of the species, following Lionel Verney and the people he loves through war, political collapse, and finally a pandemic that leaves him alone on an empty earth. It was largely dismissed on publication and only rediscovered as a major work in the last few decades, which makes it feel less like a museum piece and more like something waiting to be found.

Pick it if Frankenstein left you wanting more of Shelley’s voice at its most unguarded. The grief in this novel is not subtext, it is the engine of the whole book, and that rawness gives the apocalypse scenario a weight that most disaster fiction never reaches.

What to Expect

A longer, slower novel than Frankenstein, closer in structure to a 19th-century epic than a Gothic novella. The first half is largely political and social, tracing friendships and rivalries among a small aristocratic circle, before the plague arrives and the book narrows to survival and loss. The prose is denser and more digressive, closer to Shelley’s Romantic contemporaries than to genre fiction. It rewards patience rather than pace, and it is best read after Frankenstein, not instead of it.