The Fox in the Attic

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

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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

[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

Also see:

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.

The Wooden Shepherdess
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Hilary Mantel

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.

In Parenthesis
By David Jones
Preface by W.S. Merwin

"This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, and was part of": with quiet modesty, David Jones introduces one of the grandest imaginative efforts to grapple with World War I.

In Hazard
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by John Crowley

The author of A High Wind in Jamaica is at his best on the high seas, where man's furious nature is matched—perhaps outpaced—by the intensity of the natural world. "A small masterpiece of lyric terror about a cargo ship that runs into a hurricane, but also about the rest of life." —Simon Schama

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $17.95
Price: $14.36 (20% off)

Feb 28, 2001
344 pages
ISBN: 0940322293
9780940322295
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

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