Hanna wrote her first novel at the age of seventeen. After travelling the USA, Hanna developed a particular fascination with the country which led to her studying for a BA in American History. She’s incredibly tuned in to the political climate in the US, particularly in recent years, and increasingly she was finding that the only way to make sense of everything that was happening, the huge changes to politics and society, was through the eyes of historians. It was out of the events of 2016 and the increasing feeling that history was repeating itself, and the world was on the edge of collapse, that the concept for The Last came to be. The Last is her fourth novel, and first for Penguin.