A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, The Human Predicament. Hughes's Tolstoyan novel re-creates the traumatized worlds of England and Germany in the aftermath of World War I, and features an extraordinary portrait of Adolph Hitler at the beginning of his career. Its sequel, The Wooden Shepherdess, offers a panoramic depiction of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, concluding with a terrifying account of the Night of the Long Knives.At once novels of ideas and explorations of the dark spaces of the heart, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess are outstanding works of historical fiction in which the past returns in all its original uncertainty and strangeness.