On January 1, 2021, the last human being born on Earth — known as Omega, born in 1995 when humanity's fertility inexplicably ceased — is stabbed to death in a bar fight in Buenos Aires. P.D. James's novel opens with this fact in historian Theo Faron's diary, in a world that has had twenty-five years to contemplate its extinction: emptying cities, elaborate state funerals for pets, a totalitarian government with nothing left to govern toward.