Foxash

’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.

Kate Worsley’s first novel, She Rises, won the HWA Debut Crown for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Prize in the US. She was born in Preston, Lancashire and now lives on the Essex coast.