Equations of Life by Simon Morden

Imagine a London after the world was decimated by unknown terrorists with nuclear bombs. Now imagine it twenty years later. This is the novel setting for Morden's book (and as it turns out, the first in a trilogy) and it's a ramshackle place full of squalor and pain, think gangland Los Angeles, Russian Mafia and Hi tech corporate crime. In some ways a caustically recognisable London and in others completely different.

The story is complicated but can be boiled down to boy tries to save girl but gets resisted by all of the above and then some. It's also got high level physics thrown in as an after thought - the author's a physicist and one can't help feeling he couldn't write a protagonist who wasn't at some level a fantastic scientist - with a background that reads part Jason Bourne and part Good Will Hunting. To be honest though, despite the valiant attempt at avoiding cliches (which is only sometimes successful) and the sketchy descriptions of the world his hero lives in, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It rips along at a fair old pace and doesn't get bogged down in too many Basil Exposition moments even if it does have a number of pop culture references that Petrovich is simply too young to know of...

Morden's take on the future is interesting and underneath it is some solid thinking, not least about tech, the nature of intelligence and the point of doing good. I like this book and will definitely be picking up the other two he's written.