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." -- 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 "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." -- Jane Shilling Prospect "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." -- Tom Gatti New Statesman "The bleakness of Foulds's message...is not reflected in the richness of the prose or characterisation of this deep, dark, demanding tale." -- Lesley McDowell Independent on Sunday "[Foulds] matches his flair for rhythm with a skilful ownership of both his prose and a complex narrative. All delivered with a minimalist restraint." -- Will Dean Independent "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." -- Tim Martin Daily Telegraph "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." -- Thea Lenarduzzi Times Literary Supplement "Wonderfully enticing." -- Lucian Robinson Literary Review "Individual scenes are often gripping, shocking or moving." -- John Harding Daily Mail "The bloody horrors of conflict are captured with visceral aplomb in this fine, minimalist novel." i "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." -- John Preston Evening Standard "Foulds has the literary intelligence to turn the commonplace on its head." -- Alberto Manguel Guardian "A high-class thriller ... Foulds has a literary novelist's feel for [Sicily's] harsh beauty." Mail on Sunday "Foulds' prose is superb... It reads like Catch-22 written by Evelyn Waugh." Good Book Guide

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.