A Wolf Among Wolves is a fragmented novel where each chapter also works as a standalone short story, orbiting around—and interrupted by—a central novelette: The Boat People. Nearly all the chapters feature the same protagonist, who is also the author, or are linked to the novelette. It’s literary speculative autofiction with a dark, comedic, satirical edge.
Adam’s son finds a box of writings, drawings, and photographs in the attic, but the contents have been spilled and mixed up. Some pages are incomplete or damaged. What follows is how the son has pieced together his father’s writings. This acts as a framing device, a smokescreen, and a justification for the fragmented, non-chronological structure and varying styles.
The writings cover a range of styles and genres, but they explore recurring human and societal themes, including technological advancement, faith, memory, addiction, migration, community, climate change, and family. The stories connect, merge, and amplify each other to create a more truthful picture of a life and the consequences of choices. It also explores escape, through migration, technology, faith, or substances.
The Boat People is set in a near-future Dover, where the Earth is possibly about to die. A drug-addicted teacher meets a Syrian doctor on the beach, assuming he is a refugee smuggled in by boat. The story reveals that the Syrian had a very different journey and was involved in a tech billionaire’s plot to colonise a distant planet for the chosen few. But this is all background noise to Adam, who is just trying to survive life, family, work, addiction, and mental health.
The Boat People is interrupted by short stories, vignettes, and fragments of memory that deepen the themes, expand the world-building, and reveal some of Adam’s formative moments. These include a fast-paced thriller, a Zoom session between a burnt-out angel and a human therapist, a disastrous first date, a religious cult, and a trip to a free party in his father’s stolen car.
The title references a book Adam was read as a child—A Lamb Among Wolves. But over time, Adam comes to realise he is not a lamb. He is a wolf among wolves. It also references the Bonnie “Prince” Billy song Wolf Among Wolves, with the line: “Why can’t I be loved for what I am, a wolf among wolves…”
Geometry is used as both metaphor and structure, symbolic and literal. Stories loop, repeat, overlap, and intersect in the same way as the image on the book’s cover (which was also found in the attic box). I’ve also created a series of similar images that form and break down, acting as chapter markers for The Boat People.
I hope the effect is that the stories and memories intersect, overlap, loop, and repeat—and that the reader will find their own shapes and patterns within them. There’s no traditional narrative arc, just the suggestion that living in the present and trying to do better might be enough.
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