The Fox's Walk [Paperback]

Alice Moore is eight years old and has just been left in the care of her autocratic grandmother at Ballydavid, a lovely old house in the south of Ireland. It is 1915, the First World War has just entered its second year, and, in Ireland, Nation-alists are edging toward revolution. Often lonely and homesick, living in a rigid old-fashioned household where propriety is all-important, Alice pieces together the world around her from overheard conversations, servants' gossip, and her own quiet observations. She soon realizes that her family's privilege is maintained at great cost to others. With the war always in the background, blood is spilled closer to home, and tensions mount. Divided in her loyalties and affections, Alice must choose between her heritage of privilege, her growing moral conscience, and the demands of the future.

Our narrator Alice, a precocious pre-adolescent, puts together the world from what she can overhear in her traditional Anglo-Irish family. Sent to live at the country estate Ballydavid, County Waterford with her widowed Grandmother and Great Aunt after the death of a beloved uncle at the Front. During the war, Alice eavesdrops on the hushed conversations about the ferment among the locals in the Irish Nationalist Cause. Simultaneously, we get the story of Roger Casement's activities on behalf of the Cause. Though the Casement and Alice's paths never truly cross, the complex machinations of Casement mirror the sometimes mysterious relationships in Alice's household: O'Neil, the major domo whose Jewish arriviste, Nicolas Rowe, an Irish Catholic whose politics are diametrically opposed to those of Alice's family, and the mysterious Sonia, a white Russian mystic who inveigles her way into the household. In the end, Alice works out the puzzle of her society in her own way, and chooses the future, and what she feels is morally right, rather than cling to the dictates of the past.

PRAISE FOR THE FOX'S WALK
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