The Last Days of California - Hardcover

Mary Miller is the author of The Last Days of California and the short story collections Big World and Always Happy Hour. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

“[A] terrific first novel...The Last Days of California joins a number of other recent novels written from the perspective of children or teenagers―Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. It’s hard to figure out why some are published as ‘young adult’ while others aren’t, but why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it.”
- Laurie Muchnick, New York Times Book Review

“Hilarious and heartbreaking, dark and beautiful, a novel written by one of the most observant and mordant writers alive...This book is terrific.”
- Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and The Giant’s House

“The Last Days of California is a beautiful examination of youth and family and what it means to be alive (and to fear dying) in contemporary America...every scene...tremble[s] with significance... Rarely, if ever, have we seen young American womanhood painted in such a raw and honest and heartbreaking way.”
- William Boyle, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Last Days of California is the Sense and Sensibility of pre-Apocalypse America, and Jess and Elise may be my new favorite literary sisters: different as night and day, on a road trip to the Rapture with their Evangelical parents, they find they have nothing to lose but each other. Mary Miller is a ventriloquist of adolescent angst and a nervy surveyor of American culture.”
- Alexis Smith, author of Glaciers

“A coming-of-age novel for the faithful and the faithless―and anyone in-between.”
- Michele Filgate, writer and Events Coordinator at Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

“Miller portrays her characters...with an unwavering intensity.... Miller’s prose bestows a magnetic beauty on gas-station bathroom stops, Waffle House lunches, and the cast of overfed, overstimulated travelers the Metcalfs encounter along the interstates. ...A plangent portrait of American adolescence.... [She delivers] raw the heartbreaking futility of the Metcalfs’ small triumphs, private embarrassments, and poor decisions with such hilarious precision that you become completely involved in their struggles―and, ultimately, in awe of their abiding hope.”
- Catherine Straut, ELLE

“Miller’s depiction of a squabbling, love-you-one-minute, hate-you-the-next family dynamic is spot-on, hilarious, and ultra-relatable.... Sometimes a road-trip novel, particularly one as compulsively devourable as The Last Days of California, is just what you need to get that elusively giddy, hopeful feeling back.”
- Hannah Hickok, Redbook

“The Last Days of California...is the debut of a promising new voice, a voice that describes the painful longing for transcendence and connectedness with compelling vividness and candor.”
- Emily Colette Wilkinson