Once his shift is done, he will be put back to sleep until it is time for the next.

Fed pills to forget, his job is to be head of IT for all of the silos. Troy is awoken for his first shift in the silos. In parallel to this story set in a world we would recognise is another but this one is in a different place entirely. As the urgency of what he is doing grows, Donald becomes increasingly concerned that when the time comes, his wife must be by his side. He is set to design and build a number of massive silos, dug into the earth. A young congressman, he is assigned a great task by the much older, and formidable, Senator Thurman. In the first shift – Legacy – we are introduced to Donald Keene who lives in the US in the very near future. Minor spoilers for Wool are inevitable here. What all this means is that you mustn’t read Shift until you’ve read Wool. As the years pass by in shifts we catch up with this earlier novel and, by the time we do, the twists and shocks are piling up on one another, like the levels that stack one upon other through the buried silos. We learn about the construction of these claustrophobic repositories of humanity, their reason for existence, the people who populate them or seek to destroy them, and we follow the story of one of the most memorable characters of Wool. Shift contains, within three stories now republished in one, the origin story of the silos. A follow up to Wool, and the middle novel of a trilogy, it is actually a prequel.

After finishing Wool earlier this year, I couldn’t read Shift quickly enough.

Second shift order hugh howey