The Last Man in Europe - Tapa dura

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 The Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump

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

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, The Orwell Society

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

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 for millions of readers worldwide defined the twentieth century, and is now again proving its unnerving relevance. 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 Nineteen Eighty-Four.