The Last Man

A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, is Mary Shelley’s most important novel after . With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters. From Publishers Weekly Set in an apocalyptic future ending in the year 2100, Shelley’s 1826 novel concerns a plague that destroys almost all of humankind.