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Last of Her Kind

Name: Last of Her Kind
Author: Sigrid Nunez
ISBN: 9780312425944

by Sigrid Nunez

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Overview

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year

Ann Drayton and Georgette George meet as freshmen roommates at Barnard College in 1968. Ann, who comes from a wealthy New England family, is brilliant and idealistic. Georgette, who comes from a bleak town in upstate New York, is mystified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. An intense and difficult friendship is born.

Years after a fight ends their friendship, Ann is convicted of a violent crime. As Georgette struggles to understand what has happened, she is led back to their shared history and to an examination of the revolutionary era in which the two women came of age. Only now does she discover how much her early encounter with this extraordinary, complicated woman has determined her own path in life, and why, after all this time, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."

Synopsis

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year

The New Yorker

Nunez’s ruthlessly observed portrait of countercultural America in the sixties and seventies opens in 1968, when two girls meet as roommates at Barnard College. Ann is rich and white and wants to be neither, confiding, “I wish I had been born poor”; Georgette has no illusions about poverty, having just escaped her depressed home town, where “whole families drank themselves to disgrace.” Georgette finds Ann at once despicable and mesmerizing, and she’s stunned—if not entirely surprised—when, years after the end of their friendship, Ann is arrested for killing a cop. In previous works, Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity. Here her ambitions are grander, and the result is a remarkable and disconcerting vision of a troubled time in American history, and of its repercussions for national and individual identity.

About the Author, Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez is the author of four novels including A Feather on the Breath of God and For Rouenna. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The story of a star-crossed friendship, Sigrid Nunez's superb novel centers on two women from opposite ends of the social spectrum, whose lives collide portentously during the last three decades of the 20th century. Played out against the defining issues of the day -- class, race, social injustice, and gender politics -- The Last of Her Kind portrays with ruthless accuracy the conflicted spirit of a generation that set out to change the world.

Elizabeth Benedict

The Last of Her Kind is full of incident and high drama - much of it propelled by the political landscape and idealism of the 1960's - but it is, above all, about the way women communicate and interpret their experience, bearing down on every nuance, irony, anguished interchange and heartbreaking loss. The author's name, Sigrid Nunez, is not widely known beyond the literary establishment that has bestowed several important prizes on her , but the scope and power of her fifth novel should bring her much wider acclaim.
— The New York Times

Joyce Johnson

Nunez's ambitiously conceived novel covers three decades in the lives of her two women. It opens in that pivotal year 1968 (the year of Tet and the riots at the Democratic National Convention), when two 17-year-olds meet as freshmen at Barnard College. Each girl will shortly jettison her name. The socially insecure Georgette George, a scholarship student from an abusive, dirt-poor family in the northern reaches of New York state, will elect to be known simply as George, while Dooley Drayton, the raging disaffected daughter of wealthy, upper-class Connecticut parents, will insist on being addressed as Ann (the shameful "Dooley" being the patronymic of her Southern slaveholding ancestors).
— The Washington Post

The New Yorker

Megan Marshall

…a compelling account of the 1960's and their aftermath, a carefully written and discerning narrative with closely drawn portraits of two prototypical yet unique women trying to construct a friendship across an unbridgeable class divide.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

When Georgette George and Ann Drayton meet in 1968 as freshmen roommates at Barnard College, Georgette marvels that her privileged, brilliant roommate envies Georgette's rough, impoverished childhood. Through the vehicle of this fascinating friendship, Nunez's sophisticated new novel (after For Rouenna) explores the dark side of the countercultural idealism that swept the country in the 1960s. Hyperbolic even for the times, Ann's passionate commitment to her beliefs-unwavering despite the resentment from those she tries to help-haunts Georgette, the novel's narrator, long after the women's lives diverge. In 1976, Ann lands in prison for shooting and killing a policeman in a misguided attempt to rescue her activist black boyfriend from a confrontation. The novel's generous structure also gracefully encompasses the story of Georgette's more conventional adult life in New York (she becomes a magazine editor, marries, and bears two children), plus that of Georgette's runaway junkie sister. Nunez reveals Ann's life in prison via a moving essay by one of her fellow inmates. By the end of this novel-propelled by rich, almost scholarly prose-all the parts come together to capture the violent idealism of the times while illuminating a moving truth about human nature. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Every so often you close a book, and the only word that comes to mind is "Wow." This fifth offering from award winner Nunez (For Rouenna) elicits such a reaction. Part social history and part platonic love story, it takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The action begins in 1968, when working-class Georgette George is forced to room with upper-class Ann Drayton. Georgette is wary of Ann but slowly allows a friendship to develop. As it does, both get a crash course in the ways race, class, and gender impact cultural dominance. The novel is never heavyhanded but tells an intricate story that relies on morally complex characters and their friends and family. While the women's development is foremost, the era's most important markers-the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, Black Panthers, Woodstock, hippie activities, feminist organizing, and AIDS activism, among them-offer a meaningful backdrop for each individual's sojourn. Rich in historical detail, this unpredictable novel zeroes in on what it means to renounce class privilege and sacrifice oneself in the service of human betterment. Stunningly powerful, it is highly recommended.-Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A friendship between two women, forged during the tumult of 1968, is tested, torn and reaffirmed over the course of their very different lives. Georgette George, a shy freshman scholarship student at Barnard, doesn't know what to make of privileged, idealistic Ann Drayton. A firebrand for racial and social justice, Ann asked for a roommate "as different as possible" from her, in hope of bunking with a black woman, but accepts George, who is white, because at least she is from a poor home in upstate New York. The other freshmen find Ann a puzzle, too, and George befriends her initially because no one else-black or white-does. Over time, this headstrong self-made martyr, who gives away money by the fistful and lectures her bewildered parents on the sins of being white and rich, wins her heart, until Ann's righteousness causes an irreconcilable rift. Long after the two go their separate ways-Ann continues her activism in Harlem with her black schoolteacher lover; George works her way up the masthead at a fashion magazine-Ann is arrested for killing a police officer. Although they haven't spoken in years, George knows there is much more to the story than the newspapers report. Ann, who refuses all help, is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. George cannot begin to comprehend what has befallen her friend until she runs into Ann's patrician father, recently widowed. In perhaps the ultimate betrayal, but perhaps also the only way to connect with the inscrutable Ann, they have an affair, which, especially as portrayed by the philosophically adroit Nunez (For Rouenna, 2001), eventually helps George understand that friendships have many chapters, and that Ann, who works on prison reform fromthe inside despite the wrath of her fellow inmates who won't trust a white woman, just may not have closed the book on George yet. A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.