The Fox in the Attic - Softcover

Hughes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848879792 ISBN 13: 9781848879799

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2012

Synopsis

Augustine is a young man from an aristocratic family, struggling to make sense of a world devastated by the Great War. The enemy abroad may have been defeated, but when he finds himself implicated in the death of a young girl, he becomes targeted as the enemy within. Fleeing Britain, Augustine seeks refuge and solace in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives; but what he finds is a hinterland of fierce lust and terrible darkness; a paradigm of the hunger and the hatred that promises to resuscitate a ruined Germany.

The Fox in the Attic is both a haunting tale of unrequited love, and a remarkable crystallisation of a singular moment in history. Recording the moment when Germany teetered on the brink of Nazism - the pause before the thunderous fall - Hughes' prose captures both the full weight of inevitability, and the full weight of first love.

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

From the Author:

Richard Hughes (1900-1976) published his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, in 1926. It became a bestseller in England and America, won the Prix Femina in France, and has since established itself as a modern classic. Hughes's other books include In Hazard, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, the first two volumes of an unfinished trilogy, "The Human Predicament," about the rise of German Fascism and the onset of World War II.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1848879792
• ISBN 13: 9781848879799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432