In the Wolf's Mouth A Novel

by Foulds, Adam

• ISBN13: 9780374536114
• ISBN10: 0374536112
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-05-03
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of World War II, In the Wolf's Mouth follows the Allies' botched liberation attempts as they chase the Nazis north toward the Italian mainland. Focusing on the experiences of two young soldiers--Will Walker, an English field security officer, ambitious to master and shape events; and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian-American infantryman--the novel contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years. Eloquent on the brutish, blundering inaccuracy of war, the immediacy of Adam Foulds's prose is uncanny and unforgettable.

The book also explores the continuity of organized crime in Sicily through the eyes of two men--Angilù, a young shepherd; and Ciró Albanese, a local mafioso. These men appear in the prologue and in the book's terrifying final chapters, making it evident that the Mafia were there before and are there still, the slaughter of war only a temporary distraction.

In the Wolf's Mouth has achieved an extraordinary resurrection, returning humanity to the lives lost in the writing of history.

Author Biography

Adam Foulds is a British novelist and poet. His most recent books are The Quickening Maze, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has recently been awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.