The Fox in the Attic (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Hughes MD, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940322293 ISBN 13: 9780940322295

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2000

Synopsis

A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age in the aftermath of World War I. Unjustly suspected of having had a hand in the murder of a young girl, Augustine takes refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives. There his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism. The book reaches a climax with a brilliant description of the Munich putsch and a disturbingly intimate portrait of Adolph Hitler.

The Fox in the Attic, like its no less remarkable sequel The Wooden Shepherdess, offers a richly detailed, Tolstoyan overview of the modern world in upheaval. At once a novel of ideas and an exploration of the dark spaces of the heart, it is a book in which the past returns in all its original uncertainty and strangeness.

About this title

Review:

[A] magnificent, authoritative, compassionate, ironic, funny, and tragic book, in which emotional and intellectual developments in private persons are seen to be now parallel to, now conditioned by, economic and political actions.
-- The Times Literary Supplement

An impressive and unusual historical novel.
-- Michael Holroyd

Hughes does not write with a researcher's smug wisdom-after-the-event but with an artist's power of recording the past as if it were the living present...The long passages on the Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923, Hitler's escape, hiding and capture are a tour de force of dreamlike action.
-- Time

[The Fox in the Attic] has many virtues, many strong and compelling moments; it continues Hughes's particular method of tracing the misapprehensions, confusions, and wrong-headedness of people who are either not able to grasp the complex currents of the world they live in, or are blinded by the obsessions of child mentality or political fanaticism or religion.
-- John Crowley, The Boston Review

Book Description:

'Electrifying... Hughes has Tolstoy's vision and an imaginative reach of his own, combined with an informed, analytical intelligence; the result is historical fiction of rare integrity and distinction.' Hilary Mantel

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0940322293
• ISBN 13: 9780940322295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344