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3.5 

Last Exit

By Max Gladstone
Last Exit by Max Gladstone digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

From the co-author of the viral New York Times bestseller This is How You Lose the Time War.

In Last Exit, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Max Gladstone weaves American myths—the muscle car, the open road, the white-hatted cowboy—into a deeply emotional tale.

When Zelda and her friends first met, in college, they believed they had all the answers. They had figured out a big secret about how the world worked and they thought that meant they could change things.

They failed. One of their own fell, to darkness and rot.

Ten years later, they've drifted apart, building lives for themselves, families, fortunes. All but Zelda. She's still wandering the backroads of the nation. She's still fighting monsters. She knows: the past isn't over. It's not even past.

The road's still there. The rot's still waiting. They can't hide from it any more. Because, at long last, their friend is coming home. And hell is coming with her.

“A novel carved by hand out of salt and rock and bone. This is what the Great American Novel wishes it could be: honest, furious, in love.”—Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar

“[A] deliriously strange novel of alternate universes and dysfunctional explorers. This gloriously metaphysical adventure will stick with you long after you return to the so-called real world.”—Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders


Also Available by Max Gladstone:

The Craft Sequence
1. Three Parts Dead
2. Two Serpents Rise
3. Full Fathom Five
4. Last First Snow
5. Four Roads Cross
6. Ruin of Angels

The Craft Wars
1. Dead Country
2. Wicked Problems

Last Exit
Empress of Forever

This is How You Lose the Time War (with Amal El-Mohtar)

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

56 Reviews

3.5
“Give this book until the White Hat Man shows up. The beginning is a slog. So much character introspection and inner dialogue that takes so many - way too many - words to actually say anything. Later in the book, when the story gets moving, I honestly didn't notice or mind it as much, but there at the beginning that's all there is. I found myself thinking many times about how the author was taking way too long to get to a point with his character's thoughts. But then the White Hat Man shows up, the story kicks into gear, and this book gets great. The atmosphere is almost The Dark Tower-ish, especially The Waste Lands as they're traveling across however many apocalyptic alternate worlds. There's this constant looking backwards at past mistakes - almost navel-gazing, as some other reviewers have put it - but as the history is revealed you see why these characters live in the mistakes of their pasts, and I felt it justified. They are all traumatized by what happened to them the first time. That trauma has defined their lives since. I know recommending slogging through a book until it gets good is not the best review. Ain't nobody got time for that. But if you like this kind of atmosphere and story in a book, it's worth getting there. It won't be for everyone. Lastly, there's a lot of specific politics present, especially at the beginning. The MC (and the author) seem to be convinced that their present world is coming to an end basically because of 2018-2020ish American Republican policies and actions, and rail against them repeatedly. First of all, some of that has "aged like milk", as they say. Here in Post-Pandemic reality it almost seems quaint. The book was published in 2022 but it feels like it was written in 2019 (it likely was, at least some of it). The world changed so much between those years. You can agree or disagree with the politics themselves, but limiting the "reasons why the world is ending" to a specific American phenomenon that can be pinpointed to a specific point in time seems, well, short-sighted, both in geography (the world is so much bigger than America if "the world" is entirely ending) and in time - the author mentions "kids in cages" more than once, referencing the controversy around the treatment of illegal immigrants during the first Trump administration, as one of the indicators of decline specifically. But what happens when that was ended by the Biden administration later? A reader looks at that and thinks, "well, that's not happening any more, so that's not a big deal". In a book where much of the urgency and tension, including the characters' primary reasoning for continuing their quest to stop "the rot" is that these events are showing their world is going to end soon, I feel like the author would have been better suited with less specific examples. Humanity has a continual, repeated history of plenty of bad behaviors that could come to a head soon that won't be easily stopped because it's in our nature. I know this is all very conflicting for a four-star review, but the end result when I finished this book was that I wanted more stories in these worlds and with these people. The feeling this book evoked stuck with me for a few days. That's at least a four-star book for me.”
“Pretty cool. I was impressed by how the timeline and general story direction were interlinked throughout. It really is a book about characters and for the most part this really works. Most of the worlds explored were interesting, if not a bit samey at times. Absolutely worth a read.”

About Max Gladstone

Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award–winning author, MAX GLADSTONE, has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Last Exit, Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the viral New York Times bestseller This Is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect.

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