Lucian Robinson
Will’s War
In a photograph publicising Granta’s list of the best young British novelists in 2013, Adam Foulds stood out as the only author wearing a suit and tie. Against the swath of colour displayed by the other writers, he cut an austere, faintly T S Eliot-ish figure in a dark navy suit. Foulds’s prose possesses a similar boxed-in formality; the reader is often left with a sense of what is withheld rather than what is given. It’s a style that has been well matched to the historical settings of his previous fiction and poetry, such as the Victorian lunatic asylum in his Booker-shortlisted second novel, The Quickening Maze (2009), and the stifling air of colonial decline in 1950s Kenya in his long poem The Broken Word (2008).
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