One of the first dystopian novels ever written, The Last Man traces the impact of an unstoppable pandemic as it slowly overtakes the world. Beginning in the year 2073, the story follows Lionel Vesey--the titular last man--and his circle of friends as the disease creeps from continent to continent and erodes the foundations of civilization. Published in 1826, after the death of Shelley's husband, her stepsister, and her two children, The Last Man is both an eerily accurate story about humanity wrestling with disaster and a moving fable about surviving personal grief.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the author of five novels and numerous works of short fiction, though she is best known for Frankenstein. The daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was steeped in the progressive ideas of the early-19th-century British Romantic era.