In the Wolf's Mouth

Starred review from April 7, 2014
Combining careful, considered prose with horrific realism, the latest from Foulds (Man Booker finalist for The Quickening Maze) expertly renders the Allied campaigns in Italy and North Africa during WWII through the experiences of a handful of bluntly human characters. Ciro Albanese, a well-connected criminal, fled Italy just before the Fascists took over 20 years ago. He returns as a guide for the liberators, his illicit skills only sharpened during his time away. Will Walker joined the English Field Security Service with grand designs. He's convinced he could change the world for the better, if only his superiors would listen to him. Ray Marfione, an infantryman from New York, finds community in his squadron, but even the tightest bonds seem fragile against the war's terrifying violence. Each of these characters is desperate in his own way, and Foulds follows them across rough, beautiful terrain, as the war, indifferent to their intentions, determines their fates. By the end, which features some difficult, realistic, and earned resolutions, readers will be amazed at this deeply felt, vivid novel.

May 1, 2014
The title of Foulds' latest (The Quickening Maze, 2010, etc.) refers to an Italian good-luck saying tinged with fear, a fitting reference to the interconnected fates of three World War II soldiers-one British and two Italian-American-after the liberation of Sicily.British enlistee Will, the university-educated son of a schoolmaster in a rural English village, is disappointed to be assigned, not to the battlefield, but to Field Security Services. Doing mop-up work, first in North Africa and then Sicily, he proves better qualified than the officers above him, but his suggestions are generally, sometimes disastrously, ignored. Ray, a sensitive working-class kid from New York with dreams of writing screenplays, experiences the surrealist horror of battle in North Africa, where most of his company is killed. Because he speaks some Italian, he's then sent to Sicily, where he watches a new friend get blown to pieces after stepping on a land mine. Shellshocked, Ray wanders into the palace of the prince of Sant'Attilio, where the prince's lonely daughter, Luisa, hides him as she nurses him back to health. Also stationed in Sant'Attilio is Albanese, a petty New York mobster the Americans enlisted for his Italian and general knowledge of Sicily, where he was born. The English are clueless in sorting out the sociology of the Sicilian town, but Will's instinctive qualms about Albanese, whom he meets briefly on several occasions, are all too correct. When Albanese escaped Sant'Attilio in a casket almost 20 years earlier, he left behind a young wife and a profitable position working as the prince's representative (while cheating him on the side). In Albanese's absence, his wife remarried, and the prince gave his job and his house to one of his former shepherds. Now Albanese will go to any length to get back his wife and his home. Foulds writes like no one else; while individual scenes are rendered with poetic simplicity, they fit together into an elliptical, complex plot readers will puzzle over long after finishing this novel.

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January 1, 2014

Foulds's novel The Quickening Maze won the European Union Prize for Literature and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize; his full-length poetry work, The Broken Word, was a Costa and a Somerset Maugham Award winner; and Julian Barnes called him "one of the best British writers to emerge in the last decade." All of which recommends his latest novel, set during World II as the Allies chase the Germans north from Africa to Italy. At the heart of the narrative are Will Walker, an ambitious English field security officer, and the greener Italian American infantryman Ray Marfione. We get an eyeful of organized crime in Sicily, too.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2014

One of Britain's most acclaimed young writers, Foulds (The Quickening Maze) has a penchant for historical fiction, lyrical prose, and the complexity of memory. Here, he weaves all three themes into a meditation on the intricacies of war. Setting his work in Sicily and North Africa during the end of World War II, the author uses multiple characters to give the reader a full picture of the perplexing questions that war raises. While a British officer tries to instill law and order through logic, an American soldier struggles to process the atrocities committed by the Allied forces. Meanwhile, an Italian shepherd finds blood feuds renewed as an expatriated mafioso returns to Sicily to claim his territory. Each character wanders through the ravaged landscape, negotiating the concept of liberation with an unavoidable feeling of loss. VERDICT As in his first novel, The Truth About These Things, the author explores the inescapable aspects of memory, binding cultures and generations together with the necessity of forgetting and forgiving. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2014

One of Britain's most acclaimed young writers, Foulds (The Quickening Maze) has a penchant for historical fiction, lyrical prose, and the complexity of memory. Here, he weaves all three themes into a meditation on the intricacies of war. Setting his work in Sicily and North Africa during the end of World War II, the author uses multiple characters to give the reader a full picture of the perplexing questions that war raises. While a British officer tries to instill law and order through logic, an American soldier struggles to process the atrocities committed by the Allied forces. Meanwhile, an Italian shepherd finds blood feuds renewed as an expatriated mafioso returns to Sicily to claim his territory. Each character wanders through the ravaged landscape, negotiating the concept of liberation with an unavoidable feeling of loss. VERDICT As in his first novel, The Truth About These Things, the author explores the inescapable aspects of memory, binding cultures and generations together with the necessity of forgetting and forgiving. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.