The Last Man

England has become a republic. The plague has begun somewhere else. Both facts will move closer. Lionel Verney grows from an angry, neglected boy into the friend of Adrian, the former king’s idealistic son. Around them gather Idris and Perdita, the brilliant and destructive Lord Raymond, and Evadne, whose pride survives rejection. Love and political ambition carry them from Windsor to a war for Constantinople. Then disease crosses borders that armies and governments cannot hold. Cities empty, loyalties narrow, and the future contracts from a nation to a household, from a household to a single witness. Before Lionel becomes the last man, Shelley makes him remember everyone who made solitude unbearable.