Fox's Walk Book

Set in Ireland during the period leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916, The Fox's Walk is Annabel Davis-Goff's finest novel yet-a captivating portrait of a family and a way of life that will be changed forever by the First World War.

Alice Moore is eight years old in 1915 when her parents leave her with her autocratic grandmother at Ballydavid, a beautiful old house in the South of Ireland. Often lonely and homesick, living in a rigid, old-fashioned household where more is said than is spoken, Alice is forced to piece together her world from overheard conversations, servants' gossip, and her own quiet observations.

Alice comes to love Ireland and to consider Ballydavid her home. She also comes to understand that her family's privilege is maintained at a cost to others and is based on prejudice, exclusion, and injustice to those outside the small closed circle of the Anglo-Irish. Outside the circle, but important in Alice's life are a psychic countess down on her luck, a Catholic boy whom Alice hero-worships, an admired governess, as well as many of their neighbors.

In the background always is the Great War. The sons of some of the local farm laborers serve in the English army, but others, Irish Nationalists, are edging toward revolution. Sir Roger Casement, a revolutionary whose antecedents are not so different from Alice's, is actively working for the cause of Irish independence. In the aftermath of the rising, Casement is convicted of treason and hanged. Horrified by the lengths to which the English government will go to regain control over Ireland and divided in her loyalties and affections, Alice must finally choose between her heritage of privilege, her growing moral and political conscience, and the demands of the future.

The New York Times

Anyone who doubts that it is possible to write about Ireland's history without bitterness or sentimentality should be directed to the works of Annabel Davis-Goff. In the last 14 years, Davis-Goff...has written three novels and one memoir about her native country. But if her preoccupation with Ireland is deep and abiding, her approach is resolutely dispassionate. With the eye of an anthropologist, she scrutinizes the world of the Anglo-Irish gentry in which she grew up, teasing apart its social fabric and holding up its various conventions for inspection.—Alice Truax