The Last Man in Europe

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 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 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 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
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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.
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