Miku the Literary Cat Review: Hanna Jameson's The Last

AGATHA CHRISTIE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Miku’s take:

“I was pleased with this red box of words my owner calls a book. She read it over about three nights in bed, which meant I could snuggle on top of the duvet. As it was a harder cover than the other ones I see her reading, she could keep it open with one hand so I could be petted at the same time for a change.

I heard her tell my Dad she found it both highly literary and plot driven at the same time and apparently that pairing is unusual to find but good together. Like when they finally give me ham and chicken food, i.e. the best.”

• three out of four paws, recommend if you are a bed cuddle cat like me.

Miku’s Mum’s take:

If I lived to 150 years old I wouldn’t have enough time, skill or talent to write a book like this. Jameson gives us beautiful prose and a murder mystery for the gods. She occasionally edges us towards possible supernatural forces being at play, despite this very man-made nuclear disaster billed from the start, and we go with her. Disbelief is so suspended she could even escape scott-free with an “it was all a dream” denouement. But she doesn’t.

This apocalypse is a real as a mushroom cloud over a city. What she manages to do, that so many less skilled cannot, is make the end-of-days backdrop a handy plot device rather than the whole plot.

The characters were fully formed and I can still see them in my mind, because they live there now, transported by the act of telepathy that occurs with genius writing.

I seriously hope this is not THE LAST we hear from Jameson.

(Even my cat is giving me side-eye for that last sentence, sorry.)