Posted on my blog : http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2014/02/wolves/

I totally agree with that old saying “never judge a book by its cover”, but more often than not it is the cover that piques your interest. If it didn’t all books would look the same surely? Cover art is an important part of a book. It is the major thing I miss when buying ebooks. And the cover of Wolves is certainly an attention grabbing one. I first spotted it on Carl’s January Covers post and although I knew nothing about the book I picked it up when I spotted it in the library.

Wolves by Simon Ing

Wolves by Simon Ing (click through for a larger version)
It is a fantastic cover.

But while the cover might prompt you to pick up a book it is the story itself that is the really important thing. Otherwise I’d just buy cool looking postcards1 . I knew nothing about the story before I started reading, I hadn’t even glanced at the blurb apart from knowing that it was about augmented reality and set in the near future. So I’m not sure how much I should reveal.

Conrad narrates the story. It begins when an old friend contacts him after Conrad has been in an accident and his girlfriend has been seriously injured. Michael and he used to be best friends, but life happened and they drifted apart. The story often relives moments from Conrad’s past, when he and Michael used to go to school together. There are a couple of incidents revealed through the novel that offer an insight into why Conrad is the way he is. Because, to be honest, at the start of the novel I found him to be a dick. And he certainly has his dickish moments, and some of those actions are unforgivable, in my opinion, but he has issues. With a capital I S S U E S. It isn’t an excuse, but it made me somewhat more of a relate-able character. The problem is it comes out through the course of the story and I was tempted to give up before those incidents were revealed.

Luckily for me I didn’t give up on the book, because by the end is a hugely rewarding novel. It isn’t a sci-fi novel in the hard sense. It is set in the near future and the technological advances are only beginning, as are the problems that might, or might not, end up in The Fall of society, as Michael fears. But the science plays a hugely important part in the story, which is the story of Conrad growing up and becoming an adult, as well as solving the mysteries of his past. So you could describe this book as a coming of age novel, even though our protagonist is no teenager at the start of the book.

It is a huge pity that the start is so slow, but I don’t know how it could have been changed, because it all pays off so well in the end. But I can’t rate it any higher than an 82 even though the final third of the book was very much unput-downable. It is also a book that I think would really reward a reread. Hopefully at some stage I’ll get a chance to revisit Conrad and Michael and their world. ( )

The story in Wolves concerns two friends, Conrad and Michel, who often played doomsday games as children. Michel retains this outlook into adulthood, writing an apocalyptic novel and intent on building an ark to keep his family safe from the Fall his is convinced is coming. Conrad gets into advertising and from there into "augmented reality," a way of superimposing elements on the real world via special lenses. Conrad's mother, a woman with a history of psychological problems, died when he was fifteen, and he's never known whether it was suicide or might have been murder.

This book has been categorized by the publisher and other sources as science fiction, but despite the near-future technology that comes into play towards the end, it reads more like something A.M. Homes might have written, if she was English. I liked the writing and the parts of the novel, but the whole didn't quite come together for me. And I have no idea why it's called Wolves or why there is one on the cover. Still, I'd be interested in trying something else from this author. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2018/12/review-of-wolves-by-simon-ings.html ( )

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… ( )

Dull - got about a third of the way through and gave up. Basically a story about a trivial young man wandering around sponging off people - no discernible SF element. ( )