The Last Man - Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years after Frankenstein, on returning to England from Italy after her husband Percy's death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling elite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates the story, a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague.