Prototype invites you to celebrate the launch of Alan Rossi’s novel Our Last Year, with Alan reading from the book, and in conversation with author Daisy Hildyard.
Our Last Year is a book about change, transformation and metamorphosis; through the internal narration of its two characters, the novel follows the disintegration and renewal of a marriage, in synthesis with a much wider natural reality. It tells a story of damage and destruction, both painful and restorative, and necessary for change. The trajectory of the novel – of becoming part of the planetary process, awake to it, enlivened by it, compassionate towards it – is dramatised through two minds, with an honesty and openness that urges us to contemplate our relationships with others and with our environment.
By engaging with the thought processes of its characters, Our Last Year examines human nature and selfhood with an unrelenting gaze, asking us to reconsider our understanding of our own consciousness – how it controls us, and how it might become a source of invention, creativity and connection.
A deep but unaffected book about learning how to listen – to a cicada, or to an oncoming storm, or to the person sitting right next to you. It’s also a full-on story of a relationship crisis which made me laugh, cringe, and think.
Daisy Hildyard
Alan Rossi’s fiction has appeared in Granta, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, and many other journals. His novella Did You Really Just Say That To Me? was awarded the third annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. His fiction has also won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Mountain Road, Late at Night, was published by Picador in 2020.
Daisy Hildyard is the author of The Second Body and Hunters in the Snow, and a recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 Under 35’ honorarium from the National Book Foundation. She holds a PhD in the history of science and lives with her family in North Yorkshire. Her latest novel, Emergency, is available now from Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Astra House in the US.
The event will take place on Zoom, and is free to attend.
Date: Tuesday 20 September, 2022
Time: 8–9pm
Tickets: free, but booking required
