The Wooden Shepherdess - Hardcover

Hughes, Richard

3.84

99 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860460135 ISBN 13: 9781860460135

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1995

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The sequel to The Fox in the Attic, The Wooden Shepherdess takes up the story of its hero Augustine in America in 1924. After a year of aimless wandering Augustine returns, a wiser and more mature man, to his sister Mary and her husband, Gilbert Wadamy, in Dorset. In Germany, Hitler uses his own trial after the ill-fated Munich putsch as a propaganda platform, before retiring to jail to write Mein Kampf and consolidate his position as leader of the National Socialist Party. Back in Britain, Augustine witnesses the social contrasts between working class and upper classes in a Britain mired in the consequences of the Depression. The novel ends with a vivid and terrifying account of Hitler s party purges in the Night of the Long Knives. This edition also contains the twelve opening chapters of the, sadly unfinished, third part of Richard Hughes s epic historical fiction.

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Review:

The two volumes we already have of "The Human Predicament" [The Fox in the Attic, The Wooden Sheperdess] are in themselves enough to make the novel a major and unique contribution to the century's fiction.
-- Walter Allen

About the Author:

Richard Hughes (1900-1976) was born in Surrey, England, but his ancestors came from Wales and he considered himself a Welshman. After an early childhood marked by the deaths of two older siblings and his father (his mother then went to work as a magazine journalist), Hughes attended boarding school and, with every expectation of being sent to fight in the First World War, enrolled in the military. Armistice was declared, however, before he could see active service, and Hughes was free to go to Oxford, where he became a star on the university literary scene, with a book of poems in print and a play produced in the West End by the time he graduated in 1922. Hughes's first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, came out in 1928 and was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America. In Hazard followed ten years later. Hughes also wrote stories for children and radio plays, but his final major undertaking was the "The Human Predicament," an ambitious amalgamation of fact and fiction that would track the German and English branches of a single family into the disaster of the Second World War while offering a dramatic depiction of Hitler's rise to power. The work was planned as a trilogy, but remained incomplete at the time of Hughes's death. The first volume, The Fox in the Attic, appeared in 1960, to great critical acclaim; volume two, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973. All of Hughes's completed novels are available fromNYRB Classics.

Hilary Mantel is the author of many novels, including Beyond Black and Wolf Hall.

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