Wool

Wool
By Hugh Howey

Starting life as a short story self-published on Amazon’s Kindle platform, Hugh Howey’s Wool soon took off to become an ebook megaseller, and has since been translated into over twenty languages. Now firmly in the mainstream, this book collects the first five parts of the Wool saga in an omnibus edition.

The premise here is that in the future everyone lives in a massive multi-story underground silo. Punishment consists of being sent outside the silo to be exposed to the toxic surface environment. But reality is never quite what it seems to be on your computer monitor, and our hero — a spirited mechanic from the lower levels who is unexpectedly promoted to sheriff — soon starts to unravel a plot involving the silo’s sinister IT department (hey, we all know they’re up to no good). Slow-moving, a bit conventional, and filled with clunky writing, Wool still makes for a great beach or subway read thanks to Howey’s solid plotting and rich imagining of the silo environment.