The Last Man in Europe

1947. In a damp, run-down farmhouse on the island of Jura, George Orwell is embarking on his greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-four years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that will eventually take his life, this book is 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 task – a race against death.

Dennis Glover explores the creation of Orwell's final work, which for millions of readers worldwide defined the twentieth century. Simultaneously a captivating drama, a unique literary excavation and an unflinching portrait of a beloved writer, The Last Man in Europe will change the way you understand Nineteen Eighty-Fourand George Orwell himself.



Dennis Glover grew up in Doveton, Australia, before studying at Monash University and King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser and speechwriter. The Last Man in Europe is his first novel.



'The Last Man in Europe shows its readers the influences which shaped Orwell’s masterpiece, but transcends even that, giving an affecting portrait of the man himself'



'The Last Man in Europe adopts the sound of Orwell so brilliantly . . . anyone with an interest in Orwell will certainly enjoy it'



'Dennis Glover’s pacy novelisation of Orwell’s life takes its title from the one Orwell first had in mind for his totalitarian dystopia . . . Glover magically wrings high-stakes drama from thefundamentally undramatic scene of the writer at his desk'



'Rivetingly told . . . a terrifically assured hybrid of fiction and life-writing'



'Interesting, sympathetic and intelligent…Glover writes convincingly of the contribution to his work made by Orwell's first wife, Eileen. …his eagerness to relate Orwell's own experience to the making of his dystopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four is persuasive'



'A passionate but unvarnished tribute to Orwell as a man and a writer, [and] a novel that succeeds in its own right'



'highly readable, massively informative'