In The Last of Her Kind author Sigrid Nunez explores the relationship between two women against the backdrop of the last third of the 20th century. 

The two main characters Ann and Georgette meet as freshman roommates at Barnard College in 1968.  Ann comes from a wealthy, conservative background, whereas George (as she is nicknamed), is a scholarship student from a dysfunctional, violent, lower-middle class family.  Ann despises everything about her priviliged background including her race, her family, established institutions, and the people affiliated with them.  She throws herself selflessly, even recklessly, into a series of various causes - at one point even joining a group of militant revolutionaries.  George is sympathetic to many of the reform movements of the era, but her top priority is to escape her wretched upbringing and get ahead in life.  Alghough the two women forge a deep friendship, Ann's principles are so uncompromising that she becomes contemptuous of anything and anyone who is not in complete sync with her thinking and inevitably that includes George.

As narrator, George chronicles her more or less conventional life over the next several decades, but never stops thinking about Ann, and continues to admire Ann's utter devotion to her unyielding set of principles.  While Ann does manage, in a most unusual way, to do some good for humanity, the irony of this story is that Ann never really does understand what people want or need. 

This well-written story has both comic and tragic elements,  it is also a very candid examination of certain aspects of the American experience during a period of dramatic social, political, cultural experimentation and change.