Foulness

Foulness is an island off the Essex coast and its tidal path, where the cannons that sustained the British Empire through to the nuclear programme that marked its end were tested. A picturesque farming village remains at the heart of the barbed wire enclosure.

It is 1957 and James, a corporal with the Intelligence Corps, is instructed to camouflage a part of the military installation on the island. He quickly becomes embroiled in petty disputes with Sergeant Athling, the distant Major Edulis and an interfering secretary called Miss Bradshaw. But a cache of papers and artefacts will soon divert him to Victorian Tasmania, Abyssinia, and the tide of history that, almost unperceived, threatens to change their place in the world. 

Structured in fourteen sections, each of which is named for a bird that nests on the island, James’s story is told musically: each of the sections are like the movements of a tone poem, evoking the strange, liminal atmosphere of the half-submerged island: It is a book about memory and erasure.

Foulness marks the arrival of an exciting new English novelist, whose writing conjures the oppressive ambience of Le Carré while extending the acute sensitivity to landscape and history of a W.G. Sebald or a Patrick Wright.