In the Wolf's Mouth

The eagerly awaited follow-up to The Quickening Maze by the brilliant young prize-winner.

Astounding vivid snapshots that somehow mimic the fractured intensity of real firefight: the delicately crafted but deceptively powerful images of each staccato chapter linger and resonate. Reading this book is like remembering war…an expertly crafted work of dark beauty and intensity.

Wonderful – subtle and atmospheric. Foulds's prose frequently verges on poetry – with its intensity and neat turn of phrase … impressive.

Adam Foulds writes like an angel about devilish things... The supple, sensuous beauty of his prose is bewitching… The pace and tension of a political thriller… Superb novel.

Powerful and persuasive… As admirable as it is disturbing.

Adam Foulds is a young British novelist of striking talent and eclecticism. His style is first-rate, combining precision with a rich poetic imagination. He is able to do more with language, and at greater depth, than most other British novelists of his generation.

The pellucid elegance of Foulds’s fictional voice is entirely his own. He conjures with exhilarating assurance the sense of a postwar collapse of order so complete as to be almost voluptuous.

Ambitious and diffuse... Foulds is a master of concision and clarity, and his prose is "poetic" in the best sense: never florid or rambling, each short sentence weighed and parcelled out.

The bleakness of Foulds’s message…is not reflected in the richness of the prose or characterisation of this deep, dark, demanding tale.

[Foulds] matches his flair for rhythm with a skilful ownership of both his prose and a complex narrative. All delivered with a minimalist restraint.

There's much to admire in this novel. Foulds has a searching eye for detail and an apparently helpless compulsion to wring imagery from his subject.

Foulds’s writing invites...returning to consider each layer of the composition...there is a prismatic quality to the language which allows various levels of interpretation to be separated out and refined.

Individual scenes are often gripping, shocking or moving.

The bloody horrors of conflict are captured with visceral aplomb in this fine, minimalist novel.

Some of the most vividly evoked battle scenes I've read – he doesn't shy away from taking risks … chilling and touching all at the same time.

Foulds has the literary intelligence to turn the commonplace on its head.

A high-class thriller … Foulds has a literary novelist's feel for [Sicily's] harsh beauty.

Foulds’ prose is superb… It reads like Catch-22 written by Evelyn Waugh.

It’s an ambitious book and the writer relates his story with poetic precision

Adam Foulds is a novelist and poet. The Broken Word won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include In the Wolf’s Mouth and The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. He has recently been awarded the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. In 2014 he was named as a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet.

From the author of the Man Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze 
 
In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the lives of four very different men, all of them navigating the chaos and horror brought about by the Second World War. Fighting for the Allies are Will Walker, an ambitious English Field Security Officer and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian-American infantryman who dreams of home and the movies. Meanwhile in Sicily, Angilù, a young shepherd caught up in corruption and Cirò Albanese, a sinister Mafioso, are fighting their own battles with devastating consequences.

The Quickening Maze

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize - the brilliant novel from one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

A seamless blend of historical fact and fiction...Foulds's writing has a poetic intensity and his descriptions of the autumnal woods around the asylum are as piercingly keen as his insight into the minds of the patients, the doctor and his family

Adam Foulds won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award, and he is a skilful poet. These talents are well displayed in his prose which, while lyrical, never grows fussy or highfalutin'. He draws a walk-on character with a few deft strokes

A work of strikingly beautiful, unforced writing

The chief pleasure of the book is its prose: exquisite yet measured, precise, attentive to the world

Fould's exceptional novel is like a lucid dream: earthy and true, but shifting, metamorphic - the word-perfect fruit of a poet's sharp eye and novelist's limber reach

Intensely pleasurable to read, studded as it is with electrically acute images and phrases

Foulds wisely resists the temptation to turn Clare into an idiot savant, lunacy as the flip side of genius. The horror of a disintegrating mind is also subtly conveyed through fractured internal monologue

Foulds was fast becoming the pin-up boy of contemporary poets...this beautifully described second novel suggests he's equally a master of prose

A profoundly imagined historical novel, with a gripping plot and some memorably beautiful scenes

This imaginative, atmospheric period novel has style and a host of characters

It takes courage to write a novel about two of Britain's best-know poets - John Clare and Alfred Lord Tennyson - and their encounter in an Epping Forest asylum. It takes skill to turn that into an engrossing, beautiful novel.  Foulds has shown both

Rich in its understanding and representation of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between

Every character, every narrative strand is stunningly written, making it an engrossing and unusual historical novel

The world he evokes is conjured up with remarkable intensity and economy of means

The novel is most notable for its savage descriptions of rural life

Foulds does a marvellous job of evoking the atmosphere of the forest. His prose has none of the awkwardness one often encounters when real-life characters are brought into play

With its unflinching look at treatments of madness, and its authentic period feel, this is an appropriately disturbing, while also beautifully written, story of human endeavour - and human failure.

Chosen in The New Yorker Books of the year 2010: 'An intricate homage to two nineteenth-century poets'.

Adam Foulds was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and his book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, the following year. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008 and named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 
 
After a lifetime's struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in 1840 the nature poet John Clare is incarcerated. The asylum, in London's Epping Forest, is run on the reformist principles of occupational therapy. At the same time, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and became entangled in the life of the asylum. This historically accurate, intensely lyrical novel, describes the asylum's closed world and Nature's paradise outside the walls: Clare's dream of home, of redemption, of escape.

The Broken Word

A narrative sequence of extraordinary power - the first book of poetry from a major writer - named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Adam Foulds was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and his book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, the following year. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed, The Quickening Maze. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008 and named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. 
 
Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. 
 
Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.

Adam Foulds

Pitch-perfect sentence by pitch-perfect sentence, Foulds weaves a quiet but harrowing tale of obsession that takes the reader into the characters’ tragic downward spiral – Dream Sequence is as good a novel as I have read in a while.

Lawrence Osborne, author of Beautiful Animals

Incisively well-written and alluringly readable… This prose is truly poetic, being concise, not impasto… This novel moves like a thriller… A terrific book about the realities and delusion of fame distorting the way we live now: not to be missed.

Adam Foulds is the real deal… it’s the details of the writing itself – the precision of the word selection combined with the precision of the observation – that make for such enjoyable reading.

This mordantly clever story about fame, fantasy and narcissism… is deliciously funny… Foulds is a very fine writer.

An exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love… Foulds is proving himself to be a very versatile writer of intelligence and charm.

Everyone loves a good page-turner full of aspirational scene-setting, but few literary novelists dare to try it… [Dream Sequence] is a sexy, celeby drama… just like The Great Gatsby, this novel billows around you like a queasy dream, its grand scenery and awful characters combining to take us out of the real world and into another, oddly shimmering version of it.

A nuanced, original and sharply observed study of fame and power… [a] spare and beautifully written novel.

Foulds's observations are spot-on and his prose is delicious sharp.

Funny, dramatic and poignant. The final five pages of the novel resolve in a masterly poetic unification of suspense and feeling. Adam Foulds… has won many literary awards and this new work deserves to win another.

Absorbing and beautifully written, Foulds’ novel is particularly illuminating on the actor’s craft and the nature of fame.

[A] lucid, richly detailed and tense novel.

[Adam Foulds's] signature psychological sensitivity and attention to detail... shine through [in Dream Sequence].

[Foulds] is an astute observer of behaviour and speech… acutely tuned in to his characters’ physical experience… many sentences in this book have wings.

Foulds… does not disappoint with this psychological exploration that tests the limits of control.

[A] live-wire exploration of sex and power.

Foulds’s style is the instrument of a virtuoso, at once rich, resonant and startlingly precise… in sentence after perfect sentence, [he] has created something altogether more strange: an acid, amoral tale of hunger and haunting.

Dream Sequence notices everything… intimate and visceral, scratching at the glossy surface of the lives of the characters and underpinning the “vacuum” they move through, together but apart.

Foulds' prose is both evocative and scrupulous… It's a novel wired with anticipation of the central characters' eventual meeting, and it doesn't disappoint.

With shades of JG Ballard, Foulds teases violent subtexts from the blandest urban environments. His polished prose fits the two empty lives perfectly… [a] chilling tale.

A novel about the brutality of fame and what happens when fandom turns to obsession, from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Quickening Maze 
 
Henry Banks, a brilliant, anxiously ambitious young actor prepared to go to any length for a role, is finally on the brink of achieving serious celebrity. 
 
 However, Henry has – unwittingly – become an important part of the life of recently-divorced Kristin. Sitting in her beautiful, empty Philadelphia home, Kristin’s obsession with Henry grows and she becomes convinced they are destined to be together. Flying to London she resolves to bring their relationship to fruition no matter what the cost… 
 
‘This mordantly clever story about fame, fantasy and narcissism is deliciously funny… Foulds is a very fine writer’ Observer

Adam Foulds

Praise for Dream Sequence

Pitch-perfect sentence by pitch-perfect sentence, Foulds weaves a quiet but harrowing tale of obsession that takes the reader into the characters’ tragic downward spiral – Dream Sequence is as good ...

Incisively well-written and alluringly readable… This prose is truly poetic, being concise, not impasto… This novel moves like a thriller… A terrific book about the realities and delusion ...

Adam Foulds is the real deal… it’s the details of the writing itself – the precision of the word selection combined with the precision of the observation – that make for such enjoyable reading.

Pitch-perfect sentence by pitch-perfect sentence, Foulds weaves a quiet but harrowing tale of obsession that takes the reader into the characters’ tragic downward spiral – Dream Sequence is as good ...

Incisively well-written and alluringly readable… This prose is truly poetic, being concise, not impasto… This novel moves like a thriller… A terrific book about the realities and delusion ...

Adam Foulds is the real deal… it’s the details of the writing itself – the precision of the word selection combined with the precision of the observation – that make for such enjoyable reading.

Pitch-perfect sentence by pitch-perfect sentence, Foulds weaves a quiet but harrowing tale of obsession that takes the reader into the characters’ tragic downward spiral – Dream Sequence is as good ...

Incisively well-written and alluringly readable… This prose is truly poetic, being concise, not impasto… This novel moves like a thriller… A terrific book about the realities and delusion ...

Adam Foulds is the real deal… it’s the details of the writing itself – the precision of the word selection combined with the precision of the observation – that make for such enjoyable reading.

Books by Adam Foulds

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