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Our Last Year
Our Last Year is a book about change; through the internal narration of its two characters, the novel follows the disintegration and renewal of a marriage, in synthesis with a much wider natural reality. It tells a story of damage and destruction, both painful and restorative, and necessary. The trajectory of the novel – of becoming part of the evolutionary process, awake to it, enlivened by it, compassionate towards it – is dramatised through two minds, asking readers to reconsider their relationship with themselves, with others, and with the planet itself.
- GenresNovels
246 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 19, 2022
About the author
Alan Rossi
3 books28 followersI am the author of this bio, writing in the third person about myself: Alan Rossi’s fiction has appeared in Granta, the Missouri Review, Conjunctions, New England Review, Agni, and Ninth Letter, among others. His novella, Did You Really Just Say That To Me?, was awarded the third annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and he was the New England Review/Bread Loaf Scholar for 2017. He is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Mountain Road, Late at Night, was published by Picador in 2020. His second novel, Our Last Year, was published in the fall of 2022.
My website, which is just a blog, is linked somewhere around here.
My website, which is just a blog, is linked somewhere around here.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 30, 2025
This is my second novel. It's a novel about a relationship, but it's also a novel about the natural world, and then it's a novel about perception, reality, and connection. It took me a year to write the first draft, and then a year or two after that to revise the novel into its current form, though the structure and narrative was already essentially in place. It's informed by my practice of Zen Buddhism. In particular, the prose style is a style that evolved from zazen, watching the stream of thoughts in my own mind, and then understanding that this stream of thoughts - this story - exists for everyone. It's a novel about how this stream of thinking is often out-of-control, negative, and makes us miss so much of the rest of life.
I want to do something strange here and give some insight into how the book was formed, which also means I'd like to shed light on how others shaped the book, too, that it didn't just come from me. The title comes from a friend - we were talking about some pages I had shared with him, and I said something like, I'm not sure I can write this, since it's about our last year. I was referring to my own relationship. He immediately said, Our Last Year is a good title, and that's what it's been called since.
Jess Chandler and Aimee Selby - my editors at Prototype - helped to expand and complicate some of the passages of the natural world in the book. They worried that some of the passages could be read as metaphorical in a very cliched way, which was not what I wanted. For instance, a reader could mistake the rainstorm in the first section as being somehow metaphorical of "sadness," but the intention with the rainstorm is merely that it is created by certain causes and conditions, just as the couple's relationship, the state it is in, is created by past causes and conditions. This has something to do with the Buddhist notion of Karma. Additionally, I view the natural world not as metaphor, but as a mirror - it is us, though not in a way we immediately have access to.
Several friends gave me comments to cut things when the prose maybe became overindulgent or went too far into certain tracks of thinking.
The winter section is the most heavily fictionalized, and the section I worked on most with Jess and Aimee, and also my agent, Seren Adams, who is a brilliant line editor. The tone and various boundaries and various sympathies took a while to get correctly calibrated, though the trajectory of the section remained essentially the same from the first draft - all revision was in nuance of line and sentence.
My partner/wife read the draft first and gave me a lot of comments, and helped me to understand her point of view during the time period the novel covers. While I wrote the book, she offered insight into her own mind states and her memories of what had happened, and asked that several things be changed for accuracy, things that either appeared of no importance to me, that I had gotten wrong, or that I had misrepresented in an effort to possibly "sugarcoat" things. It was difficult at times to revisit that year, but in hindsight, we both feel it was incredibly beneficial, in understanding ourselves, our relationship, and our connection, like everyone's, with the rest of the world. These conversations and revisions deepened the novel, I think, and gave it what I hope is a larger sense of reality.
I view the book as a relationship novel, a love story, between two people, and with all of reality. It is a novel that is actively working against the literary cliche that you can never know another person. Breaking down what that "knowing" is, what our view of "another person" is. It is also a complete repudiation that a hetero relationship works only in one way or can only be conceived in a certain way. It repudiates that "desire" is the central aspect of any relationship. It repudiates the notion of "self" in the way we understand self, as well as self's importance.
I hope you enjoy it and get something from it.
Thank you for reading it.
Alan
I want to do something strange here and give some insight into how the book was formed, which also means I'd like to shed light on how others shaped the book, too, that it didn't just come from me. The title comes from a friend - we were talking about some pages I had shared with him, and I said something like, I'm not sure I can write this, since it's about our last year. I was referring to my own relationship. He immediately said, Our Last Year is a good title, and that's what it's been called since.
Jess Chandler and Aimee Selby - my editors at Prototype - helped to expand and complicate some of the passages of the natural world in the book. They worried that some of the passages could be read as metaphorical in a very cliched way, which was not what I wanted. For instance, a reader could mistake the rainstorm in the first section as being somehow metaphorical of "sadness," but the intention with the rainstorm is merely that it is created by certain causes and conditions, just as the couple's relationship, the state it is in, is created by past causes and conditions. This has something to do with the Buddhist notion of Karma. Additionally, I view the natural world not as metaphor, but as a mirror - it is us, though not in a way we immediately have access to.
Several friends gave me comments to cut things when the prose maybe became overindulgent or went too far into certain tracks of thinking.
The winter section is the most heavily fictionalized, and the section I worked on most with Jess and Aimee, and also my agent, Seren Adams, who is a brilliant line editor. The tone and various boundaries and various sympathies took a while to get correctly calibrated, though the trajectory of the section remained essentially the same from the first draft - all revision was in nuance of line and sentence.
My partner/wife read the draft first and gave me a lot of comments, and helped me to understand her point of view during the time period the novel covers. While I wrote the book, she offered insight into her own mind states and her memories of what had happened, and asked that several things be changed for accuracy, things that either appeared of no importance to me, that I had gotten wrong, or that I had misrepresented in an effort to possibly "sugarcoat" things. It was difficult at times to revisit that year, but in hindsight, we both feel it was incredibly beneficial, in understanding ourselves, our relationship, and our connection, like everyone's, with the rest of the world. These conversations and revisions deepened the novel, I think, and gave it what I hope is a larger sense of reality.
I view the book as a relationship novel, a love story, between two people, and with all of reality. It is a novel that is actively working against the literary cliche that you can never know another person. Breaking down what that "knowing" is, what our view of "another person" is. It is also a complete repudiation that a hetero relationship works only in one way or can only be conceived in a certain way. It repudiates that "desire" is the central aspect of any relationship. It repudiates the notion of "self" in the way we understand self, as well as self's importance.
I hope you enjoy it and get something from it.
Thank you for reading it.
Alan
January 31, 2024
Que preciós i quin viatge i quin retrat psicològic i quin ritme i no volia que s'acabés. La història d'un any en la vida d'una parella feta miques. M'ho he passat pipa.
Want to Read
December 14, 2022I welcome Our Last Year to the ✨never ending tbr✨
congrats
also- I died laughing because I won the giveaway and a note from the author was addressed to someone named Larissa (and now I low key want it to me my secret identity)
congrats
also- I died laughing because I won the giveaway and a note from the author was addressed to someone named Larissa (and now I low key want it to me my secret identity)
October 21, 2022
I published an excerpt of this here: http://muumuuhouse.com/ar.12oct2022.html
April 7, 2024
Character goes to therapy and is desperate to tell you all about it. No space given for the reader to examine how the characters might be feeling, no room for interpretation–all spoon-fed by the author. Reads like a script. There's an irony here on the theme of struggling to give up control.
November 5, 2022
The domestic hyper-mundanity was an instant hook, like a depressed-but-still-loving Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, fully and dutifully immersed in the procedural materiality of making a kid their meal, dreading the indefinite, infinite-feeling loops of a life lived just a half-step above complete precarity. It escalates into unnervingly realistic relationship difficulties and achieves profundity. The scenes of couples therapy in particular were visceral and harrowing and felt almost as if maybe not more effective than actually attending something like that in person. Tao Lin’s blurb says that the book is “calming and healing,” which I at first took to be hyperbole but now do not. I have a vague sense that maybe not everyone will love this book and that I am in some ways close to its ideal reader, so I won’t say this full-throatedly, but rather somewhat self-consciously and with a whisper: I loved this book.
November 17, 2022
Alan Rossi’s Our Last Year is the finest novel I’ve read in recent years. His first book, Mountain Road, Late at Night, is superb, but Our Last Year surpasses that in complexity and invention. The story is about the difficulties that every marriage faces: the perils of communicating effectively when the couple is beset with the demands of parenting young children while simultaneously navigating the treacherous waters of our professional lives; balancing the needs of the other against our own compulsion to bury ourselves in the only kind of work we find invigorating and life-sustaining (whatever that work is); the temptation to choose the least painful option of giving up on the marriage over the arduous task of working heroically to save it. The story itself, because it is an honest and courageous account of both the wonder and the heartache of marriage, makes this novel superb.
But beyond the details of the narrative itself, this work seems to take the form of the novel in a new direction. Rossi is doing things I’ve never seen done in a novel. For example, his characters are nameless. The male is he, the female she, and the children themselves are the younger and the older. It seems to me that this is not simply a stylistic choice; it is, rather, a choice that squares well with the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. (Rossi is a Buddhist philosopher who deftly weaves philosophy into the narrative.) What I mean here is that Rossi is doing more than narrating the journey of a marriage; he is considering the existential difficulties of asserting one’s individuality over against living creatively within the constraints of community. To that end, of course, Rossi might just as easily have replaced the gender-specific pronouns with the more malleable terms husband and wife. That is to say, the book is not about a marriage between a specific man and a specific woman. The book is about marriage.
And yet, I read this story as my own. We often say of a character in a novel, “I identify with this one. I see myself in the thoughts and actions of him/her/them.” But the identification is never exact. In the reading of Rossi’s novel, however, I experienced an exactitude or precision that was both frightening and inspiring. The writer has managed, in ways I still cannot fully grasp, to tell my story. This is what I mean when I say that Rossi is doing things with the novel I’ve never seen done before, and I cannot adequately account for all of what I earlier termed his invention.
Rossi’s is a new voice in literature—one that will have to be reckoned with by readers, teachers, and writers alike.
But beyond the details of the narrative itself, this work seems to take the form of the novel in a new direction. Rossi is doing things I’ve never seen done in a novel. For example, his characters are nameless. The male is he, the female she, and the children themselves are the younger and the older. It seems to me that this is not simply a stylistic choice; it is, rather, a choice that squares well with the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. (Rossi is a Buddhist philosopher who deftly weaves philosophy into the narrative.) What I mean here is that Rossi is doing more than narrating the journey of a marriage; he is considering the existential difficulties of asserting one’s individuality over against living creatively within the constraints of community. To that end, of course, Rossi might just as easily have replaced the gender-specific pronouns with the more malleable terms husband and wife. That is to say, the book is not about a marriage between a specific man and a specific woman. The book is about marriage.
And yet, I read this story as my own. We often say of a character in a novel, “I identify with this one. I see myself in the thoughts and actions of him/her/them.” But the identification is never exact. In the reading of Rossi’s novel, however, I experienced an exactitude or precision that was both frightening and inspiring. The writer has managed, in ways I still cannot fully grasp, to tell my story. This is what I mean when I say that Rossi is doing things with the novel I’ve never seen done before, and I cannot adequately account for all of what I earlier termed his invention.
Rossi’s is a new voice in literature—one that will have to be reckoned with by readers, teachers, and writers alike.
October 31, 2022
I had read an Alan Rossi novel before and his writing style was so engaging that I was anxious to get started with “Our Last Year”. He can string words together in long sentences that work like a paint brush to create images and thoughts. He really wants you in there with him. The reader feels like he or she is joining him in his mind. His thoughts are shared in such transparent detail. I wondered if this new story would read like that again, and it most certainly did.
At different times in the book I felt the pain of both characters in that relationship and knew of so many marriages that struggle as this couple did, but this author is able to help the reader know each character in a personal way that makes it so real. Alan Rossi also holds back details to share at key moments in a way that clarifies each character in subtle “aha” moments of understanding.
Who doesn’t love a good ending, but only if it is believable. I did end up believing that this couple, this journey through therapy, and this outcome for them could have happened……..and knowing it actually did, made it even more special.
At different times in the book I felt the pain of both characters in that relationship and knew of so many marriages that struggle as this couple did, but this author is able to help the reader know each character in a personal way that makes it so real. Alan Rossi also holds back details to share at key moments in a way that clarifies each character in subtle “aha” moments of understanding.
Who doesn’t love a good ending, but only if it is believable. I did end up believing that this couple, this journey through therapy, and this outcome for them could have happened……..and knowing it actually did, made it even more special.
October 23, 2022
Beautifully written with stunning clarity Our Last Year submerses the reader in one couple’s emotionally fraught, heartbreaking, and finally triumphant year. As the couple’s relationship transitions from difficult and aloof, to cold and barren, to rebirth and growth so too does the natural world. While we are immersed in the couple’s evolving relationship told with forthright language, the exquisite beauty of nature moves through its own change.
Realistic in its portrayal of each character’s thoughts and actions the author takes us intimately along on the pair’s journey. With the help of a counselor the couple is able to save a marriage and see and hear each other again.
Compelling, heartbreaking, and ultimately rendering rebirth and growth, Our Last Year will grip your heart and move you.
November 22, 2022
This book is a deeply moving portrait of a marriage in crises and the courage necessary to try to see the heart of another person. I loved the way the journey this couple took was surrounded by amazing stories of the connectedness of the natural world. These stories seemed to be illustrating how we are all connected in some way and how our actions impact our loved ones, our community and the natural world. It points out the importance of learning to truly listen to the people and environment closest to us. This is a remarkable book.
December 28, 2025
el mejor libro que he leído en 2025. frases infinitas que te sumergen en una vida, un mundo, una galaxia. madre mía, menudo viajazo. gracias Alan!!! corriendo a leer más libros escritos por este señor.
October 23, 2022
This is an exquisitely written story of a failing marriage and a couple who manage to rediscover themselves. Simply, it’s about cause and effect, both in the natural world and in our innermost consciousness. Just as conditions impact the natural world, our perception is a condition that impacts what we see as reality. Negativity, in particular, makes it difficult to think clearly or to truly see another person. For the husband, his negativity was simply born of his desire to be a productive artist during a creative dry spell and this prohibits him from really seeing his wife and her needs. She, in turn, stops loving him -stops seeing him.. From there the novel delves into the vast grief implied by the title Our Last Year.
The couple’s path forward is often brutally painful, but in the end, this is also a novel about the possibility of renaissance and the transformative power of love. It’s about a man and woman fighting their way back into a relationship and learning to see possibility through living deeply in the moment to really see one another. The final chapter of the book resonates with sheer joy, the deeper joy of reclaiming love that has been lost. Looking back, I find myself smiling at the title. Their last year had to be on many levels their best year, as they found their love for each other could once again take root.
The couple’s path forward is often brutally painful, but in the end, this is also a novel about the possibility of renaissance and the transformative power of love. It’s about a man and woman fighting their way back into a relationship and learning to see possibility through living deeply in the moment to really see one another. The final chapter of the book resonates with sheer joy, the deeper joy of reclaiming love that has been lost. Looking back, I find myself smiling at the title. Their last year had to be on many levels their best year, as they found their love for each other could once again take root.
August 3, 2023
This book is a journey into the lives of a young married couple fraught with conflict and pain, yet as you follow them along this path you experience the transcendence of grace and love and how suffering and sadness can create a pull towards recognizing what is important in one’s life; the oneness a couple can come to feel when their commitment to each other is reestablished; and in spite of the uncertainty of one’s future within the relationship of marriage how conflict can help seal one’s commitment to it. The couple reveal their own individual feelings, fears and frustrations within the scope of their marriage, the stifling day-to-day obligations, responsibilities and monotony to work and their roles as parents to two young daughters. Throughout the story the author is precise and consistent in portraying how each one’s feelings affect the relationship climaxing in an arc towards catastrophe and destruction. Interspersed in their own sadness, anxiety and misery is the environmental effect walking parallel with them while the author poignantly and exquisitely describes the natural world around them. This book touched my heart deeply as I walked beside the characters hoping they could bring themselves back from the brink.
June 23, 2023
This was an extraordinary novel. It made me think about my own marriage and human relationships and it made me think about the larger world, like starving mountain lions and the shrinking wilderness and so on too. I would recommend it to anyone.
February 29, 2024
I felt this was an incredibly honest, tender, thoughtful, and hopeful book. It changed how I relate to myself, the people I love, and the world generally. I am very grateful to the author for sharing this story.
July 23, 2025
A simple idea, almost perfectly executed. Poignant without getting its feels from the usual plot sources. I usually go for intensity in a novel, but this satisfied me in its thoroughness.
Shout out to ARX-Han, a substack reviewer and lit-scene commentor, who alerted me to this book.
Shout out to ARX-Han, a substack reviewer and lit-scene commentor, who alerted me to this book.
May 3, 2026
started this ages ago and blitzed through the first half, but wasn’t in the headspace then to engage with the shift in the second half. love the way this is written. scarily canny how familiar the internal dialogue feels
February 19, 2025
Good writing - I love this publishing house
August 15, 2025
i feel so happy to be living a life where trying hard matters
January 3, 2025
Beautiful writing. It feels like you are inside the characters' mind. The sections on the natural world are a bit excesive, it made me lose track of the story, though I can recognise it has its purpose of representing seasonal change and reflecting the couple's worries and misgivings.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews