Adam Foulds
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Adam Foulds
Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter—tribal violence and subsequent retribution—that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined.
Tom has returned to his family’s farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land—attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives—the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as “Britain’s Gulag”. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence…
Adam Foulds
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum—an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen.
For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought “the edge of the world was a day’s walk away”, a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness.
Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates—the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the…
