Wooden Shepherdess [Hardcover]

Richard Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 1973

This historical novel follows the fortunes of Augustine through the inter-war years and also charts Hitler's rise to power as he recovers from the 1923 Munich putsch.

Editorial Reviews

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 --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: 400 pages
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus; 1st edition (April 5, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0701119462
• ISBN-13: 978-0701119461
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,640,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Only for Hughes Fans, October 3, 2009

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Richard Sweeton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Wooden Shepherdess (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I have all of his books and have read them all several times. When this edition of the Wooden Shepherdess was published, I bought it -- even though I had an earlier edition -- because of the promise of being able to read a part of the unfinished third volume of the series. Although I have even read that part several times, it's always a disappointment. It is just a rough sketch of what was to be a finished work.