The Fox in the Attic is a 1961 novel by Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes (writer)

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was a civil servant Arthur Hughes, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in Jamaica...

, who is best known for A High Wind in Jamaica. It was the first novel in his unfinished "Human Predicament" trilogy.

Plot summary

The novel opens in 1923. The protagonist, a young Welsh aristocrat named Augustine Penry-Herbert, is incorrectly suspected of having something to do with the accidental death of a young girl whose body he discovers, and so decides to leave England and visit distant relations in Germany. While there he falls in love with his cousin Mitzi, while in the background the rise of Nazism occurs, including the Munich Putsch. At the end of the novel, Mitzi, who has lost her sight, enters a convent, and Augustine returns to England.

The second novel in the trilogy, The Wooden Shepherdess was published in 1973; it carries on the story to 1934 and the Night of the Long Knives

Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives , sometimes called "Operation Hummingbird " or in Germany the "Röhm-Putsch," was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political murders...

. The third and final novel was left unfinished, Hughes realizing that he was unlikely to see it published.