The Fox's WalkThe Fox's Walk

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Praise For The Fox's Walk

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, who was born in County Waterford and now lives in New York City, 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.

- The New York Times Book Review


The Fox's Walk is a New York Times Notable Book of 2003

The Fox's Walk is Annabel Davis-Goff's engaging and keenly particular story of a watchful little girl caught at a fateful historical crossroads. Set in the Irish countryside around Waterford in 1915 and 1916, the novel unfolds with bloody World War I as a constant unseen presence in the background. And not a distant presence, either: Less than 100 miles away, just off the coast, a German submarine torpedoes the Lusitania "in full sunshine." …….. Davis-Goff paints a fine, moving and sometimes surprisingly funny portrait of a world which seems to have wobbled off its axis. The usual methods of coping are not up to the task at hand in this place where the center, all too obviously, will fail to hold. …The Fox's Walk is a gently compelling read, rewarding and sharply observed.

- The Seattle Times

The last days of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, told with leisure and grace…Here, we watch these events from the perspective of the Anglo-Irish gentry – the most privileged and (during these years, at least) also the most unfortunate class of Irish society….Alice has the surreal experience of going through the motions of daily life – tennis parties, social calls, trips to Dublin – in the shadow not only of the war in France but of a deeper terror much closer to home. The usual gossip of friends and neighbors includes rumors of arms shipments from Germany along with speculations on crops and the weather, and the older scandals of adultery and divorce have been supplanted by the betrayals of Irish Protestants (like Roger Casement or Yeats) going over to the nationalist cause. The world is always strange for a child – but for Alice Moore, growing up in a stately home that could be burned to the ground any day, the strangeness is well grounded in reality.

A rich, impressionistic account, in an old-fashioned style, of a dying world in the last hours before sunset.

- Kirkus (Starred Review)

A pivotal few years in Irish history 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…Davis-Goff brilliantly chronicles the vanished world of the Anglo-Irish gentry. 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.

- Publishers' Weekly

Davis-Goff continues to stake out her fictional territory – a milieu that is Anglo-Irish in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel proceeds at a stately pace…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

©2015 Annabel Davis-Goff