The Last Girl: A Novel

By Stephan Collishaw and stephan-collishaw

Book Overview

For a full hour I sat at my desk and stared up at the two photographs. One by one I smoked a packet of twenty Prima cigarettes.... The earth, I felt, was beginning to shift, and the long dead were stirring. In the closing days of the twentieth century, an elderly writer wanders the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania, possessed by the need to photograph the young mothers of the city. In their faces and the faces of their children he sees the reflection of a secret that haunts him. A secret he has spent years trying to bury. In a decaying back street of the city a woman struggles to raise her family. As her son dreams of a better life she is torn between Vilnius's twilight world of prostitution and her determination of securing hope for her children. She too is haunted by memories that rob her of sleep. In Vilnius the rubble of the Jewish ghetto lies side by side with the fallen statues of communist heroes. Through this tangled debris of past and present the story of the writer's great love and his even greater betrayal begins to coil its way to the surface and demands to be told.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312312989
• ISBN13: 9780312312985
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.1" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Simply heart breaking

This straightforward, beautifully-written novel breaks your heart and puts it back together again. It is not overly ambitious but the author suceeeds in creating a story that draws you in and makes you reflect. It takes courage and skill for a writer to develop serious weaknesses in a character and still have the readers feel compassion for him or her. In most of these situations, I come to dislike the character. But not in this book. Everyone we meet is multi-dimensional and full of complex baggage. They are just trying to survive and find meaning in a cruel and unfair world. But at the end, the book is all about redemption and new opportunities in life no matter how far a person has fallen. What a satisfying experience!