In his second novel, Adam Foulds, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and the author of the Booker-nominated The Quickening Maze, plunges readers into the thick of the action as American and British troops close down World War II in Africa and Sicily. Foulds’s narrative is episodic, with prose that flashes like the bullets and explosions it evokes; grim scenes are sharply noted—as when a man suddenly becomes a “body full of incomprehensible space”—and the troops move on, “catching up with the battlefield.” When the Allies reach Sicily, where In the Wolf’s Mouth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) is slang for “good luck,” the soldiers’ perspectives are joined by those of princes, peasants, and thugs; with the world war out of the way, the local battle for Sicily goes into high gear, and the traditional feudal system gives way to the Mafia. Speaking for the latter is Ciro Albanese—a truly scary character. Naturally brutal, he becomes breathtakingly ruthless as he returns to his village from America to claim what’s his.
