Description

‘A wonderfully atmospheric and deeply unsettling novel, full of images so vivid they seem to leap off the page. Worsley’s fiction is something to savour’ Sarah Waters

‘A rich, wonderfully uneasy pleasure. Exquisitely written and deeply original, with secrets that are tightly layered, always surprising and teased out with impressive control’ Bethan Roberts, author of My Policeman

Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding – part of a Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land. When she comes down to Essex to join him, it’s not Tommy who greets her, but their new neighbours. Overbearing and unkempt, Jean and Adam Dell are everything that the smart, spirited, aspirational Lettie can’t abide.

As Lettie settles in, she finds an unexpected joy in the rhythms of life on the smallholding. She’s hopeful that her past, and the terrible secret Tommy has come to Foxash to escape, are far behind them. But the Dells have their own secrets. And as the seasons change, and a man comes knocking at the gate, the scene is set for a terrible reckoning.

Combining a gothic sensibility with a visceral, unsettling sense of place, Foxash is a deeply original novel of quiet and powerful menace, of the real hardships of rural life, and the myths and folklore that seep into ordinary lives – with surprising consequences.

Publisher Review

A wonderfully atmospheric and deeply unsettling novel, full of images so vivid they seem to leap off the page. Worsley's fiction is something to savour -- Sarah Waters A rich, wonderfully uneasy pleasure. Exquisitely written and deeply original, with secrets that are tightly layered, always surprising and teased out with impressive control -- Bethan Roberts Kate Worsley has a wonderfully fertile imagination. She writes for the senses: the touch of soil; the taste of a home remedy; the whiff of decay. Her wily prose curls around the story she is telling, like a creeper -- Katie Ward Beguiling, and written with a piercing eye for style. It burrows under the surface of the rural idyll, exposing a shadowy hinterland -- Eva Dolan A spellbinding evocation of the rural uncanny. In deceptively sensual prose Kate Worsley eviscerates the idyll of the smallholding and lays bare the vicious desperation of characters pitted against the elements and themselves * Sarah Bower * I loved the brooding suspense of Foxash - both the unspoken and the fear of speaking dominate its claustrophobic setting. Worsley takes us into a revelatory and revisionist corner of the Twentieth Century. * Jonathan Myerson *