Wolves

By Simon Ings

A chilling literary dystopia for those who love Iain Banks and JG Ballard.

Conrad is desperate for an escape after a devastating accident changes his way of life. When his childhood friend, Michel, invites him to come and see the boat that he and his partner are refurbishing, Conrad sees his chance to leave it all behind. But rekindling their friendship unearths old fears and dangerous secrets, and Conrad is soon desperate to flee again.

Through it all, Conrad becomes ever more entrenched in Augmented Reality - living in worlds dreamt up by other people. But as the floodwaters rise, and he hits the limits of imagined worlds, he is forced to confront the new realities before him - a flooded country and a horrific secret buried in his own past.

A searing mix of literary horror, murder mystery and dystopia, Wolves is a fierce and uncompromising look at greed, technology and climate collapse - and the wolves at the centre of it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785659218

Simon Ings

Simon Ings is the author of eight previous novels and two works of non-fiction, including the Baillie Gifford longlisted Stalin and the Scientists. His debut novel Hot Head was widely acclaimed. He is the arts editor of New Scientist magazine and splits his time between a sweltering penthouse in Dubai (not his) and possibly the coldest flat in London. simonings.com @simonings

Reviews for Wolves

[nwhyte-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought I was going to do my genre gatekeeping act with this one again, but in fact the specific new technology does play an important narrative role towards the end. Plot involves uncovering 'orrible family secrets. Within genre boundaries, doesn't really do much with that position.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I missed reading this earlier in the year even though it was shortisted for the BSFA Award. (It lost out to the disappointing Ancillary Sword.) I’d actually read five of the eight shortlisted books, but had I read Wolves when I filled in my ballot I might well have made it my first choice. I’m surprised it didn’t make it the Clarke. Anyway, the narrator works for a start-up which is developing Augmented Reality – a combination of Google Glasses, Heads-Up Displays and VR – which is bought out by a media mogul. Much of the novel, however, covers the narrator’s past, when he grew up in a hotel used chiefly as a hospice for blinded soldiers, who were fitted with a form of seeing-eye technology by his inventor father. His mother suffered from mental health problems, and would often disappear often to some Greenham Common-type protest camp for weeks at a time. One day, he finds her body in the boot of his father’s car. She has committed suicide. Too scared to tell his father, he disposes of the body himself. It is never found. The mystery of her “disappearance” is one of the narrative threads in Wolves. Another describes the slow collapse of country (I may be misremembering, but I don’t think its setting is categorically stated). And then there’s the identity of the mogul, who proves to be one of his father’s patients all those years ago. The plot is perhaps a little confused in places, but the writing is excellent, the dark surreal tone extremely well done, and, like Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies, I’m surprised this book didn’t generate more of a fuss when it was published. But then, like Theroux’s novel, it’s not the sort of book that fits in with the genre’s current narrative…