Review
“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
“In his highly compelling, deeply researched novel The Last Man in Europe―the title Orwell almost gave Nineteen 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
“Enthralling . . . a sprawling but compact recreation of Orwell’s last years and his writing of the book, with impressionistic glimpses of the events which shaped the novel . . . Glover convincingly enters Orwell’s often-prickly psyche, documenting the heartbreaks and betrayals which created his unique and prophetic world view . . . The Last Man in Europe (the title itself is significant, as it was the working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four) is a unique and thought-provoking work, intellectually challenging and emotionally rich. It will likely compel readers back to Nineteen Eighty-Four ― never a bad thing ― and force them to take a look at the world around themselves, to consider warnings unheeded.”
- The Toronto Star
“Dennis Glover's The Last Man in Europe fictionalizes 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 writing 1984, and Glover's fabulous book shows why.”
- Shelf Awareness
“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
“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
“A quite astonishing achievement. 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
“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
“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 . . . 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.”
- Library Journal, Starred Review
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.
