Last Day
Published by Spiegel & Grau
In this profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise - and celebrate as if the day is truly their last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. With the heart-wrenching wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Domenica Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel, she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet.
Praise for Last Day
“Darkly glittering...the novel ignites.”
New York Times Book Review
“A beautifully written, thought-provoking book about life at the end.”
Refinery 29
“After making a splash with her memoir, With or Without You (2013), Ruta returns with an inventive first novel. Ruta imagines that people have been observing Last Day on May 28th for centuries, coming together to celebrate life on Earth as though it might all end at any moment…. an entertaining and clever speculative tale.”
Booklist
“Ruta delicately sketches the large cast of characters—as well as their dreams, fears, and failures—with care. She's able to pinpoint certain universal feelings with precision… A beautiful portrait of humanity in the shadow of a dying Earth.”
Kirkus
“LAST DAY is a galaxy unto itself, a profound and incisive slice of our world on the edge of its inevitable end from a brilliant voice in American fiction.”
Amelia Gray,
author of Isadora
“Mesmerizing. Last Day held me so powerfully in its orbit that I read it in one night. In Ruta's brilliant, large-hearted, and all-too-plausible debut, people prepare for an inevitable end-of-days by practicing a ritualistic annual apocalypse "holiday." On Last Day, totems are burned in bonfires, amends are made, sojourns taken, and at a storied Boston tattoo parlor, patrons get inked for free. This earth, like ours, is populated with beautifully flawed characters who are proficient at destroying--and resurrecting--their own lives, with or without the aid of a large-scale natural calamity.Each stunning sentence reminded me of all I love about our earth, and all that would be lost on a real Last Day. I'll be thinking of this novel for a very long time.”
Alena Graedon,
author of The Word Exchange
With or Without You
Published by Penguin Random House
With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s youth and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta has written a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally redemptive story about loving and leaving.
Co-editing
We Got This
Domenica Ruta is a co-editor of the award-winning anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Heart, Grit, and Humor.
