The Last Time They Met was published by Little, Brown in 2001. The novel is structured in three parts, each depicting an encounter between Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes — at ages fifty-two, twenty-six, and fourteen — told in reverse chronological order. In the first section, they meet at a literary festival (both are poets); in the second, they reconnect in Kenya where Thomas is a journalist and Linda is married to an aid worker; in the third, they are teenagers in a coastal Massachusetts town.
The reverse chronology is not a gimmick but a structural argument: we understand people backward, from who they are to who they were, and the accumulation of context changes the meaning of every detail. The literary-festival section reads as a story of middle-aged regret; the Kenya section complicates it with violence and moral failure; the final section, set in adolescence, delivers a twist that recasts the entire novel. The ending — which I will not spoil — is genuinely shocking and earned, the kind of revelation that sends the reader back to page one.
Shreve’s ambition here is considerable: this is her most formally experimental novel, and the execution is disciplined. Each section stands alone as a fully realized narrative with its own emotional texture — autumnal melancholy, tropical intensity, adolescent rawness — while the reverse structure creates a cumulative effect that no linear telling could achieve.
Collecting The Last Time They Met
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12