“In Wolf’s Mouth, John Smolens delivers a thrilling story of good versus evil: part Upper Peninsula woods adventure, part rags-to-riches tale, part love story. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written, and is bound to become part of Michigan’s folk history.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters and American Salvage
“Following the storied life of Francesco Giuseppe Verdi, Smolens not only spins a great yarn in the traditions of both Hemingway and John Irving, but investigates an intersection of cultures, the sumptuous Italy of memory mapped onto the colder, wooded reality of the WWII-era American Upper Midwest. Armed with his trademark impressive research that illuminates the shadowy and oft-forgotten corners of history, an array of well-drawn characters, spot-on dialogue, an examination of the recurring comfort of a good, familiar meal, and a wicked sense of humor, Smolens tells a quintessentially (and quintessentially quirky) American tale of love, displacement, migration, suspense, violence, and the ways in which a landscape can conspire to disappear the goodness we can only hope still lurks in the human heart.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost and The Mad Feast
“With WOLF’S MOUTH, John Smolens skillfully expands the genre of the all-too-rare Michigan historical epic, opening his gripping tale in the World War II prison camps in the state’s Upper Peninsula. This is a powerful novel of imprisonment, escape, and ultimately redemption, its every page a visceral evocation of a past we should not forget.”
—Matt Bell, author of Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
