The Last One — Alexandra Oliva

Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva's fast-paced novel of suspense.

She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.
 
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens -- but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them -- a young woman the show's producers call Zoo -- stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
 
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life -- and husband -- she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills -- and learn new ones as she goes.
 
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways -- and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
 
Sophisticated and provocative, THE LAST ONE is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated.