The Last Man

Mary Shelley’s 22-Hour 1826 Foundational Post-Apocalyptic Epic Voiced by Anna Bentinck and Matt Bates

Long before the atomic anxieties of the Cold War or modern zombie outbreaks, twenty-eight-year-old Mary Shelley invented the post-apocalyptic novel in 1826. Framed through prophetic leaves discovered inside the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl near Naples, *The Last Man* leaps forward to the late twenty-first century. England has abolished its monarchy to become a turbulent republic where Lionel Verney, an orphaned shepherd from the Cumberland fells, is drawn into the radiant intellectual circle of Adrian, the idealistic son of the last king, and the charismatic, fiery Lord Raymond. Yet their political struggles and romantic entanglements are soon dwarfed by terrifying news from the East: an unstoppable, airborne plague is advancing across continents, emptying cities and reducing empires to silent monuments.

In audio format, Shelley’s rarely read twenty-two-hour masterpiece sheds its nineteenth-century intimidation and becomes an astonishingly intimate, deeply personal elegy. Written after Shelley had lost her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, their close friend Lord Byron, and three of her children, the novel is a disguised biography of her vanished Romantic circle—with Adrian modeled on Percy and Raymond on Byron. Anchoring our Best Long Post-Apocalyptic & Wasteland Survival Audiobooks collection as the true origin point of the genre—and pairing fascinatingly with Shelley’s earlier masterpiece Frankenstein and modern pandemic elegies like Station Eleven—Anna Bentinck and Matt Bates bring stately clarity to every prophetic chapter.

At over twenty-two and a half hours for a single credit, *The Last Man* is a remarkable literary discovery for patient listeners. While the first third unfolds as a sumptuous Regency-style political and romantic drama before the plague arrives in full force, the slow build makes the eventual collapse of human civilization—and Lionel Verney’s solitary walk through the overgrown ruins of Rome—all the more devastating. For anyone curious about where wasteland fiction truly began, this unabridged Naxos AudioBooks production is an essential, historic listen.