(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Any time any author decides to take a well-established genre, give it a good shake-up and reshape its form entirely is a good time.
Especially when it comes one as well-trafficked as the end-of-the-world genre which has been pretty much full-to-bursting with zombies and aliens and suspect Mayan calendar interpretations and just about any threat imaginable.
Finding a new entry to this genre that doesn’t feel like a faint and barely inspired reinterpretation of the stale and tired tropes and cliches is a miracle but that’s exactly what The Last Bookstore on Earth by debut author Lily Braun-Arnold feels like from its sassy beginning to heartfelt end.
In this highly original take and frankly terrifying take on cataclysmic storytelling which feels more than a little too truth adjacent to be comfortable – the culprit here is rogue, horrifically destructive storms and let’s face it, we’re headed that way in the here and now – and which centres on a protagonist who doesn’t follow the usual survival route that many end of the world stories demand.
When a devastating storm hits the United States, many people die, leaving just a shell of a society behind; the survivors of a weather event that is nightmarish in the extreme are left to huddle down and try to make the best of things, and while quite a few people do go the violence and tribalised weirdness route, one plucky but emotionally vulnerable bookseller in New Jersey does not.
I watch the way she grimaces in her sleep. I watch the way she clenches her hands every once in a while. I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake.
Liz is a young woman on the cusp of going to college when the storm strikes, killing her family and leaving her with no choice but to go and live in the bookstore where she has worked part-time through her teens and to hope that it will provide the sanctuary she needs.
Certainly it is full of the books that have always given her comfort and joy, especially when school was hell and her parents’ marriage was falling apart in an agonisingly slow and corrosive fashion, but more than that, it is a point of familiarity in a world stripped in one storm of all the trappings of life as Liz has known them.
There’s also the added benefit of a community of people who stop in and take a book in exchange for food, water, batteries or some other necessity, who leave mail for other survivors to collect should they happen by and who leave their own survival stories for her to collect so they won’t be forgotten.
Safe in her bookstore cocoon, Liz is content to wait out whatever happens next, which not long into vThe Last Bookstore on Earth turns out to be another storm, word of which spreads through rumour and gossip since, of course, there’s no weather service to alert anyone.
No one is quite sure when it is due, relying on the flightiness of birds and animals, which in retrospect it was realised twigged that the first world-ending storm was on its way, but one thing is certain – whatever Liz’s world has become, it’s about to end and change all over again.
So not just one apocalypse but two fill the pages of The Last Bookstore on Earth and it’s safe to say that with a broken wall and roof that’s seen better days, Liz is not necessarily going to survive the next storm.
Enter Maeve, all bristling attitude and and consummate survivalist skills – something Liz doesn’t have thanks to spending her post-civilisation crashing days hiding away, sensibly you might think, from the rather vicious dog-eat-dog world outside -who initially tries to steal from Liz before moving in and forging and friendship and then something far greater and more meaningful as the days go on.
Theirs is very much a meet-cute under pressure at the end of days, and as the next storm approaches, its arrival predicated on so many uncertain assumptions that it could make its destructive presence felt tomorrow or in a month, they have to pull together to get the supplies they have in order and to fend off violent tribal groups who want to take everything for themselves, everyone else be damned.
You may thinking at this point that The Last Bookstore on Earth sounds like every other apocalyptic tale you’ve ever read, and in some respects you’d be right; Braun-Arnold does doff her storytelling cap to more than few tried and true tropes of the genre.
But that’s not the whole story of this remarkable and often quite moving novel which draws on beautifully told exposition to fill out Liz and Maeve’s respective worlds and why it is they need each other so much.
When I was little, like really little, I read a book about the end of the world. I think it was sort of a gateway drug, and then fiction gave way to real life, and here we are.
Where The Last Bookstore on Earth truly comes into its own is it focus on a survivor who doesn’t do all the things most people do.
She is allowed to be traumatised, to still be wrapped in grief and extreme loss, because she has a place to call home, unlike most other people, and she has had just enough food and water etc to stay alive without killing others or going all Lord of the Flies on everyone else.
This means that even though the novel is full of these types of people, Liz remains our counterpoint to them, our one true north to what people used to be, someone who even in the face of great and prevailing danger refuses to turn and run, choosing to stay in the bookstore than has become her home.
It’s Liz’s humanity that gives the novel its heart, and while there are dramatic scenes and some truly harrowing moments, how could there not be, what emerges most forcefully and gently too in The Last Bookstore on Earth is just how much of your humanity you can hang onto if you choose to and how love is not a spend commodity when the world itself almost gasps its last.
Braun-Arnold doesn’t tell a simplistic tale and it’s certainly not just a case of love winning over everything in the face of impossible odds – that it might do it is not the whole story – but of one person, and then two, facing down what everyone else is doing and choosing to be different for a whole host of reasons but primarily because they want a home when no one thinks there can be such a thing anymore, and they, especially Liz, are willing to fight for it in a way that defies all the conventions of the time.
The Last Bookstore on Earth is astonishingly emotive and epically big and beautifully intimate all at once, and while it makes it clear we may not have much choice about how the worlds ends, we can sure as hell control how we respond to this terrible event and we might just emerge with our humanity and sense of safety and home intact, not just for our benefit but for plenty of others besides.