By this stage we are extremely fond of some characters while others are proving increasingly to be dreaded. The worldbuilding is second to none but so too are the characters. The prose is immediate, attention-seeking and precise. This means it is very moving as well as exhilarating. The end when it comes is entirely satisfying, tying off the loose ends from the previous two novels while laying many of the stories to rest.

Dust also gives us the full stomach-sinking horrific magnitude of what this is all about and it is gobsmacking. These are great adventure stories but we also get to know people of enormous heroism and self-sacrifice. This is a carefully stratified and utterly claustrophobic world, not only physically but also psychologically. We now know far more about Don and Troy of Silo as well as the reason for the silos and the plan of those who built them.Īs with the previous two novels, Dust is extremely atmospheric with the silo world brilliantly evoked. After the prequel of Shift, Dust returns us, enlighened, to the present and we catch up with the stories of Jules from Wool and Solo from Shift. I wouldn’t want to tell you much about Dust because this final novel in the trilogy ends the sequence perfectly. But rebellion is spreading alongside a growing realisation of the truth. The rest of life descends back down the silo. After just a few minutes the cleaner is dead from the poisoned dust in the air. They are sent outside to clean the uppermost window while the deep downers of the silo make the slow ascent to watch the dust removed from the skyview. We have seen what happens to those who try to break free of the rigidity of the silo and who manage to think back to the life before. In Wool and Shift the world of the silo is brought vividly into focus as are the lives of the men and women who have to live this way consigned to one of over ninety floors, all linked by porters who run up and down the mammoth central staircase, passing messages between farms, engineering, schools, IT, law, hospitals and homes.

It would be impossible to read Dust without having first read Wool ( review here) and its successor, albeit a prequel, Shift ( review). Now it’s time to look outside the claustrophobic cylinders towards their surrounding post-apocalyptic landscape of dust.

Each novel is named so well, including the last. Partly written as novellas, now coerced together into a near perfect whole, and partly developed as more lengthy explorations of the minds of those who live within the buried, noisy, metal silos, controlling their destiny or victim of it, the trilogy is now ready to end. Over the course of 2013, one of my favourite and most intense reading experiences has been the sequence of extraordinary dystopian novels, Wool. If you’ve not read the earlier novels, Wool and Shift, then proceed no further…

Dust by Hugh Howey