In The Wolf's Mouth is a novel about war and the Mafia, about innocence and corruption, and history as an accumulation of the irrevocable. Set mostly in Sicily during the Second World War, it tells the story of an attempt to reconstruct a country after violent conflict through the eyes of several characters. Will Walker, an English Field Security Officer, attempts mastery of the great game of intelligence and intervention. Ray Marfione, an Italian-American infantryman, experiences the thought-shattering trauma of battle and slowly, in hiding, with the aid of a Sicilian Princess, attempts the long return to life. Cirò Albanese is a Mafioso who has enjoyed a long, productive exile in New York during the years of Italian Fascism. He returns to reclaim his old life, including the wife who had thought him killed long ago. With friends released from prison and the unwitting aid of the Allies, he works to re-establish the Mafia's hold on Sicily.
Written in short chapters of great lyrical intensity, In the Wolf's Mouth collides the small and luminous details of individual experience with brutally massive historical forces. It observes the characters' attempts to find meaning in all of this, to tell stories to themselves that make sense. Numerous stories interlock and come apart in the novel which records, as fiercely as it can, the events of these lives without deciding what they mean or what they're worth.