The Fox's Walk
A Novel
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- $179.00
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- $179.00
Descripción editorial
A New York Times Notable Book. "[An] engaging and keenly particular story of a watchful little girl caught at a fateful historical crossroads." —The Seattle Times
During the First World War, ten-year-old Alice Moore is left in the care of her autocratic grandmother at Ballydavid, a lovely country house in County Waterford. Living in a rigid, old-fashioned household where propriety is all, Alice is forced to piece together her world—a world on the brink of revolution—from overheard conversations, servants' gossip, and her own keen observations. She soon realizes that her family's privilege comes at a great cost to others—among them a psychic countess down on her luck, a Roman Catholic boy whom Alice hero-worships, and an admired governess, as well as most of her neighbors. After the Easter Rising, when blood is spilled close to home and loyalties are divided, tensions within Ireland and Ballydavid mount. Alice is forced to choose between her heritage of privilege and her growing moral and political conscience.
"Has the same alert phrasing, wry humor, and exquisite detail as its predecessors." —The Washington Post Book World
"A rich, impressionistic account, in an old-fashioned style, of a dying world in the last hours before sunset." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] piercingly affecting theme . . . Davis-Goff brilliantly chronicles the vanished world of the Anglo-Irish gentry." —Publishers Weekly
"An elegiac novel . . . The interest lies in the sharply observed characters and in the sensitive child's-eye view of a way of life that was soon lost." —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pivotal few years in Irish history 1912 1916 as seen through the eyes of a sensitive 10-year-old girl, whose immediate focus is her own sense of abandonment by her parents, is the piercingly affecting theme of Davis-Goff's new novel. As in her previous books (The Dower House; This Cold Country), Davis-Goff brilliantly chronicles the vanished world of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Left behind at her grandmother's country estate when her parents return to Dublin, Alice Moore at first chafes with desperate loneliness, bewilderment and misery at the strict rules of behavior in force at Ballydavid, the result of her aristocratic grandmother's preoccupation with the unbending social code of the Ascendancy. Gradually, she comes to love Ballydavid, while becoming aware of the events that signal the approaching end of its privileged status. Her uncle is killed during WWI, and the family's mourning seems endless. Rebellion is brewing in Ireland, the Easter Rising occurs and Sir Roger Casement, a Protestant considered a traitor to his class, will be martyred. With deft assurance, Davis-Goff conveys the complex social order of the Anglo-Irish hierarchy, in which class, religion and political thought, heretofore complacently stratified, are undergoing vital challenges. As she traces Alice's growing maturation, the narrative's elegiac tone and graceful prose do much to overcome the necessarily factual interpolations of historical events.
