Description

‘With slow, quiet intent Kate Worsley builds a tense atmosphere of looming horror. This book demands to be savoured, even as it clamours to be devoured’ Times

‘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

Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding – part of a 1030s Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land. When she comes down to Essex to join him, her new neighbours greet her. Overbearing and unkempt, Jean and Adam Dell are everything that the smart, spirited, aspirational Lettie can’t abide.

As Lettie settles in, 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 With slow, quiet intent Kate Worsley builds a tense atmosphere of looming horror. This book demands to be savoured, even as it clamours to be devoured * The Times * 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 * Foxash almost pulses with the force of its telling; the prose is lush, with a feverish, seething, darkly erotic edge. All that ripens, soon rots, and what rots must be hidden. What a story Worsley has conjured * Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown *