The Last One (2016) by Alexandra Oliva

The Last One (2016) by Alexandra Oliva

It all starts with a game. 12 contestants enter the arena for a unique reality TV experience, a game of survival on an unprecedented scale on a remote coast of the eastern United States. Released into a hostile environment and constantly challenged, they will have to fight against hunger, loneliness, danger, fear, the dark, the cold, themselves and others, well beyond the limits of what is bearable. The game will go on until there is only one left, at least officially…

But the plan soon goes awry. The scenario seems to be getting out of hand, the fiction literally overtaken by reality. And the notion of survival is now to be taken literally…

I loved this book. Despite moments when I got a little bored (especially in the even-numbered chapters), I’m obviously going to give it a very high rating.

This story calls into question a lot of things: how much are we manipulated? Whether it’s the media, reality TV or special effects, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.

This book is a stroke of genius. The author calls the contestants by their speciality or profession, so we don’t get as lost as if we were dealing with twelve first names. We’ll have characters like Zoo, Tracker, Waitress, and so on. So some love nature in very different ways and others don’t seem to belong here.

A tracker will quickly work his way to his goal, setting traps and outsmarting others. But a waitress who’s a little shallow might turn up looking very well made-up, with her hair done and wearing stilettos, to play a game of survival!

The odd-numbered chapters will focus on the team made up of these players, who will have to compete against each other, but also help each other out from time to time. Alternately, the even-numbered chapters will focus on a single person about whom we discover more and more. We suspect that she was also in the odd-numbered chapters, but she is not referred to by the same name. On purpose, of course! It’s quite a mastery on the part of the author, who takes advantage of writing a book that shows the magic of writing, par excellence. Yes, there are things you can do in books that you can’t do in films, like talking about two characters without you knowing they’re the same. I had to deal with this in Peter James’s La Mort leur va si bien/Looking Good Dead (2006).

A friend of mine told me that “odd” starts out a bit like “individual”, whereas “even” would go more with “plurality”. So that (the chapters) should have been reversed! If you’ve got that kind of knack, you really shouldn’t read this kind of book!

You can see the odd-numbered chapters as the present and the even-numbered chapters as the future. But if you see the even-numbered chapters as the present, then the odd-numbered chapters represent the past. Quite a crazy concept!

Quite an adventure, chaos setting in, some kind of deadly virus arriving… and yet, this book came out in 2016! I read it around 2019, a few months before Covid arrived. So, yet another text that could be described as avant-garde. It’s already pretty amazing to read The Stand/Le Fléau, given that it was first published in 1978. However, Stephen King published a revised and expanded version in 1990.

And since I’m talking about King, I might as well talk about his The Long Walk when the film comes out. I think it’s also a book that wasn’t meant to be released as a film. We’ll see what happens! Maybe not just yet, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s also a story that’s way ahead of reality TV. After all, it’s the story of an annual event where lots of young people get shot live on TV, and people are all sitting in front of their TV sets if they haven’t come to see the show up close!

Yes, the media know how to manipulate us!

On her own website, it says: “Alexandra Oliva grew up in a small town in the mountains of upstate New York. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, young son and their brindle old dog, Codex. Her debut novel, The Last One, was selected as the Seattle Times Best Book of 2016 and has been translated into 25 languages. She is also the author of Forget Me Not and the forthcoming The Radiant Dark.”

Keep that in mind! Her next novel The Radiant Dark comes out in April 2026.

Coming back to this book, I’m really pleased that it’s been shortlisted as best book of 2016. Interesting, gripping, this novel of psychological suspense is dazzling and unsettling.

It goes without saying that if you don’t like the subjects covered in this book, if you don’t like American literature, if what you love are French authors who don’t understand anything, you can avoid this book. On the other hand, if you’re looking for good entertainment that’s exciting, well-written and very easy to understand, you can go for it!

Personally, I think I’ll remember it for a very long time. And I’d even want to reread certain passages, even certain chapters. I thought the ideas were excellent, the characters were really great and the ending didn’t disappoint – it even touched me.

That’s it for me.