The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Tara Conklin 2019

      From Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf

      Published by Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 1985

      Excerpt of three lines from “The Applicant” from Ariel by Sylvia Plath.

      Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

      ‘Maps’: Words and Music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase

      Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd.

      All Right Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC

      All Rights Reserved; Used by Permission

       Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

      Cover design by Ploy Siripant © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover illustration by Joel Holland

      Tara Conklin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008323349

      Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008323356

      Version: 2019-01-12

       Dedication

       Dedicated to the memory of Luella Briody Conklin

       and Kenneth Jerome Conklin

       For my sisters

       Epigraph

      Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

      —Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

      Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.

      —Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs