The Wooden Shepherdess

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 from NYRB Classics. »

Hilary Mantel is the author of nine novels, including Beyond Black. Her new novel, Wolf Hall, will be published in the US this month. (November 2009) »

By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Hilary Mantel

The Wooden Shepherdess is the sequel to The Fox in the Attic, and the second volume of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." It opens with Hughes's hero Augustine in prohibition era America, where he is a bemused onlooker and an increasingly fascinated participant in a country intoxicated with sex, violence, and booze. In brilliant cinematic style, the book then moves to Germany, where the Nazi Party is gradually gaining in power; to the slums, mining towns, parliamentary back rooms, and great houses of a Britain teetering on the verge of class war; and to the wilds of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The novel ends with a terrifying account of the Night of the Long Knives, as Hitler ruthlessly secures his hold upon Germany.

This new edition of the The Wooden Shepherdess concludes with the twelve chapters that Hughes completed of the planned third volume of "The Human Predicament," here published for the first time in America.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

The two volumes we already have of 'The Human Predicament' are in themselves enough to make the novel a major and unique contribution to the century's fiction.
— Walter Allen

Also see:

The Fox in the Attic
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Hilary Mantel

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."

A High Wind in Jamaica
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Francine Prose

A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.96 (20% off)

Feb 28, 2000
440 pages
ISBN: 0940322307
9780940322301
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

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