The Last Lover

Four characters in an unnamed city pursue love across a landscape that keeps dissolving and reassembling. Maria, Joe, Reagan, and Daniel circle each other through encounters that may be real, remembered, or dreamed. Relationships form and collapse. Settings shift from tropical gardens to frozen wastelands. Nothing stays fixed, and yet the emotional longing at the center of every scene is unmistakable.

Why Start Here

The Last Lover is the novel that brought Can Xue international recognition. It won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, was voted The Independent’s Book of the Year in 2014, and was longlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It earned this attention because it is the most fully realized expression of what Can Xue does: fiction that operates like a waking dream, where emotional truth matters more than literal coherence.

Of all her novels, this one offers the clearest entry point into her method. The recurring theme of love, pursued and lost across shifting realities, gives the reader something to hold onto while adjusting to the prose style. The characters, though fluid, have recognizable desires. You may not always know where you are, but you always know what is at stake.

The translation by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is excellent, preserving the rhythmic, incantatory quality of Can Xue’s Chinese prose while making it genuinely readable in English.

What to Expect

A novel in multiple sections that reads more like a series of interconnected dreams than a linear story. Characters reappear in new contexts, relationships echo and transform, and the boundary between inner and outer worlds is deliberately erased. At 336 pages, it is a substantial but not overwhelming commitment. Readers who surrender the expectation of plot and allow the imagery to accumulate will find an experience that is genuinely unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.