A literary dystopian series

The Last Hand

Book One: Still Here

They took his name. They took his brother. They have not yet taken him.

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Still Here — Book One of The Last Hand
01

The Story

Two centuries after a manufactured collapse left a depopulated world ruled by a quiet ancient cabal, fourteen-year-old Elias Vance is torn from his younger brother on a windowless train and delivered to a labour camp that exists for one purpose: to forge boys into hunters for the Last Hand.

To survive the camp, Elias becomes the boy who gets up. To survive the year-long Trials in the dead lands beyond, he becomes something colder. And to find out what happened to the brother he lost, and the mother who died ten years ago with her mouth shut, he will have to climb a leaderboard built of other boys’ bodies, take a deal from a man who loved his mother, and walk through a door at the top of a world that has been waiting for his surname for a generation.

Still Here is Book One of The Last Hand: a brutal, hopeful, grounded dystopia about revenge, transformation, and the cost of becoming the thing your enemies fear.

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02

The World

Two hundred years before the book opens, the old world ended. It was not a collapse. It was a coup.

A small cabal of administrators inside what had been a global authority engineered the famines, the wars, and the plagues that returned four times in nine years and killed two of every three people. They chose pathogens that struck men hardest. What they left is a world with three or four women for every man, no nations, no place-names, only the Last Hand and the wilderness they control.

The Hand keeps its own zones clean and ordered. Everything between is melancholy, reclaimed wilderness: green growing through collapsed cities, rivers gone wild, the rusted bones of the old world swallowed by forest. There is no magic here. All the horror, and all the wonder, are human.

“A world ruled by men who ended it. A boy climbing toward the room they meet in.”
03

The Opening

I’m going to die on a cliff edge above a river I never learned the name of, because rivers don’t have names anymore, because nothing out here does.

That’s the thought I have, clear and almost calm, as the fourth one circles in behind me and I understand, with the cold math this place taught me, that there’s no version of the next thirty seconds where I walk away.

From the opening of Still Here
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04

The Author

Dominic Roworth, author of The Last Hand

Dominic Roworth is a writer from Gibraltar. A lifelong reader with a weakness for long novels (his favourite is The Count of Monte Cristo), he has only recently started writing one of his own. Still Here is his debut, the first book of The Last Hand trilogy.

Read more about the book →More about Dominic →

05

Questions

Where can I buy Still Here?
Still Here, Book One of The Last Hand, is out now on Amazon, in both Kindle and paperback. You can read the whole first chapter free on this site before you buy.
What is Still Here about?
Fourteen-year-old Elias Vance is taken from his younger brother on a windowless train and delivered to a camp that forges boys into hunters for the Last Hand, the cabal who rule what is left of the world. To find his brother, and the truth about his own family, he has to climb to the top of it.
What genre is The Last Hand?
Adult-crossover dystopia and literary speculative fiction. It is brutal and grounded, but ultimately hopeful: a character-driven story about two brothers, survival, and the cost of becoming the person you have to become to get back to the people you love.
Is The Last Hand a standalone or a series?
Still Here is the first book of The Last Hand, a planned trilogy. It tells a complete story on its own, and the wider world opens up across the books that follow.
Who is Dominic Roworth?
Dominic Roworth is a writer from Gibraltar and a lifelong reader of long novels, with The Count of Monte Cristo his favourite. He has recently started writing, and Still Here is his debut, the opening of The Last Hand trilogy.
Will there be more books in The Last Hand?
Yes. Still Here is Book One of a planned trilogy, and Books Two and Three are already being written. Join the mailing list and you will be the first to know the moment Book Two lands. We will only email you about The Last Hand, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Out now

Still here. Still here.

Still Here, Book One of The Last Hand, is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. Read the first chapter free, then take the rest with you.

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