This book is shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize. Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of the last war, In the Wolf's Mouth follows the Allies' botched 'liberation' attempts as they chase the Germans north towards the Italian mainland. Focussing on the campaigns 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 new novel from Adam Foulds contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years. Particularly eloquent on the brutish, blundering inaccuracy of war, this is a sensual, intimate experience: the immediacy of the prose uncanny and unforgettable. The book opens with the stories of two Sicilians - Angilu, a young shepherd, caught up in corruption, and Ciro Albanese, a local Mafioso - and we meet the same two men in the terrifying final chapters, making it clear that the Mafia were there before and are there still; the slaughter of war only a temporary distraction. A novel about many things, including the impossibility of good and evil, In the Wolf's Mouth shows how individual fates and truths are lost in the writing of history - lost, along with all tenderness and humanity. At the same time, Adam Foulds has remade a history: lifting it out of newsreel and back into its raw and helpless flesh and blood.

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. -- Patrick Hennessey The Times Wonderful - subtle and atmospheric. Foulds's prose frequently verges on poetry - with its intensity and neat turn of phrase ... impressive. -- Frances Perraudin Observer 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. -- Rebecca Abrams Financial Times Powerful and persuasive... As admirable as it is disturbing. -- Allan Massie Scotsman 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. -- Andrew Holgate Sunday Times

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.