The Fox In The Attic

Description

One of the great European novels of Nazism and fascism in inter-war Europe, a historical novel of huge ambition and achievement. Augusten 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, Augusten 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.

Awards

This author won the Prix Femina.

Author description

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.