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The Fox in the Attic [Hardcover]

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes (Author), Arthur Warrer (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)


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Book Description

June 1961
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.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.


Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 354 pages
  • Publisher: Harpercollins; First Edition edition (June 1961)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0060119853
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060119850
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,723,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Hughes, October 14, 2005
I read 'The Fox in the Attic' many years ago when I was seventeen. It was a revelation to me of how literature can deal with history and politics on a deeper and more profound level than simple narration of events can do. As a journalist Hughes had travelled widely in pre-war Europe and the novel reeks with his knowledge of real people and places. In one sense perhaps this is a roman-a-clef but Hughes was interested intensely in the psychology of human beings, in the irrational, half-understood motives we have for our behaviour, and his writing focuses on that as much as on giving a picture of an era. This was the first of a projected trilogy; 'The Wooden Shepherdess' being the second installment. Hughes was not a prolific writer and he died before he finished the third - whether he had begun it or not I do not know. One of the minor greats of twentieth century English literature.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The end of reader's block, March 13, 2006
By 
Joel Marks (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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I'm only writing this "review" to express my amazement that this book has not received a uniform 5 stars. Richard Hughes is one of the most sublime discoveries of my literary life. The Fox in the Attic was supposed to be the first of a trilogy. The second book also got written by this very slow and idiosyncratic author (who loves parentheses), and it is equally wondrous although rather different from the first. The third was only begun, and what got written is disappointing. Then to discover A High Wind in Jamaica ... well, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. So if, as I had, you think you're not likely to discover an entirely new (to your experience) author of truly great and enjoyable novels, banish your malaise and give this fellow a try.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars great book, April 3, 2005
I have loved many of the books in this series of reprints by the New York Review of Books. Contrary to the criticisms of the previous review, left by someone who hadn't even read the book(!), the novel explores the cultural environment in Munich just following the first world war, so in and around 1919. It's also filled with enigmatic characters and great atmosphere- mouldering castles and mysterious guests with homicidal tendencies. Definitely worth checking out.
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First Sentence:
The Human Predicament is conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War. Read the first page
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Captain Goering, Penrys Cross, High Steward, Alderman Teller, Newton Llantony, Prince Rupprecht, Significant Form, Mellton Chase, Miss Polly, Lady Sylvia, Lloyd George, Uncle Otto, Cousin Adèle, Free Trade, General Ludendorff, Hermann Goering, Putzi Hanfstaengl, Almighty God, Brienner Strasse, Captain Roehm, Grüss Gott, King George, Schloss Lorienburg
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