You *Have* To Read “Wool”…

You night remember a while back here I was sent an advance copy of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve when I had been raving about its predecessor The Passage over on Twitter.

Easons were kind enough to send me one before it turned up in the shops (possibly to get me away from hassling the nice staff they have in their shops), but, in the same package, they sent me something they said they thought I might like – Hugh Howey’s Wool.

Little did I know how right they were… I’m ashamed to say I only got around to reading the beautiful edition they sent me over Xmas.

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The story of how Hugh got it out into the real world is a whole article in itself (in brief – self-published the first short story, people loved it, published some more, now he has a deal with Random House and Ridley Scott has optioned the film rights) and now, the omnibus edition of the first 5 stories is in a bookstore near you…

In short, I’ve been reading sci-fi since I was 9, that’s 30 years this year, and Wool is one of the most glorious, thrilling, deftly written, character-driven pieces of dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve come across in….. well, ever.

I’m not going to plot spoil anything short of saying it’s set in a post-apocalyptic future in a dingy silo beneath the Earth with thousands of survivors living day to day and year to year. Don’t read anything else about it, just get on with it.

I don’t have any reservations in recommending it. If I read anything better in 2013 in *any* genre I’ll be very, very surprised.

You could always read the first chapter yourself if I haven’t completely convinced you…

http://thisiswool.co.uk/sample/Wool_book_sample_extract.pdf

7 thoughts on “You *Have* To Read “Wool”…

  1. I finished The Twelve and then jumped straight in to this (loving your Twitter reccomendations Mr. O’Shea!). I absolutely loved it. I have such a bad attention span for stories lately but this sucked me straight in. Great characters with varying degrees of likeabilty but not cliched or predictable. I’m just about to start the prequel The First Shift, which I have very very high hopes for – fingers crossed!

  2. Had thought of that meself, m’dear, but there seems to be an edition of the 3 new “prequels” coming out in April…

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