But more than that, 'Foxash' is the story of the female body growing women's fertility women's connectedness of spirit within the rural idyll. It's a story of growing: of growing crops on a smallholding (in the first year of production under the 1930s Land Settlement Association scheme) and the fertility of rural land it's the story of growing sociality, co-operaton, neighbourliness and belonging it's the story of a new life for a coalminer and his pitwife, growing seeds and plugs into cash crops of cucumbers and cane fruits. Lettie tills on towards the novel's climax, experiencing every grain of the narrative as a bodily perception: ' body feels like syrup on a spoon.' Kate Worsley enroots the story in one woman's - Lettie's - body, and cultivates a form of high sensuousness full of the felt knowledge of the physical. And as the seasons change, and a man comes knocking at the gate, the scene is set for a terrible reckoning.Ĭombining 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. She's hopeful that her past, and the terrible secret Tommy has come to Foxash to escape, are far behind them.

Overbearing and unkempt, Jean and Adam Dell are everything that the smart, spirited, aspirational Lettie can't abide.Īs Lettie settles in, she finds an unexpected joy in the rhythms of life on the smallholding.

When she comes down to Essex to join him, it's not Tommy who greets her, but their new neighbours. Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding - part of a Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land.

She rises by kate worsley