The debut novel that predicted the pandemic two years before coronavirus

When Bethany Clift began writing about people wearing face masks and social distancing to protect themselves from a deadly virus, little did she know it was about to come true, writes Tufayel Ahmed

Clift and her editor began editing the first draft of the book in early 2020, just as Covid-19 cases were rising steadily around the world (Angela Christofilou)

Bethany Clift, the debut author behind new pandemic novel Last One at the Party, has some admittedly strange advice for prospective readers: it’s OK not to read it. “I am very sensitive to the fact that there is a pandemic in it and for a lot of people this has been a terrible, terrible year,” Clift tells The Independent. “I understand there’s going to be a contingent of people who aren’t going to want to touch this with a bargepole. And to them, I say: just don’t. Just don’t read it.”

But readers who do brave Clift’s novel (published by Hodder and Stoughton) is a riotous, black-humoured tonic to get you through this latest national lockdown.

The book follows the aftermath of a deadly pandemic that has wiped out everybody on earth, but one woman. Told in first-person through diary entries, this unnamed protagonist is seemingly ill-equipped to deal with the newfound world she finds herself in, having lived a relatively sheltered life before the deadly 6DM virus wiped out the planet. Clift’s heroine is more Bridget Jones than Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s ultimate fiction heroine in Alien, as she struggles to acclimate to the end of humanity and no internet. There’s a real element of Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget Jones novels, in Clift’s writing, which is in turns laugh-out-loud funny – Clift writes of casing Harrods and touching all the priceless dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum – and heartrending.