Foxash: 'A wonderfully atmospheric and deeply unsettling novel' Sarah Waters

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Alix Dunmore is a brilliant narrator and she really made the book feel so atmospheric. She really brought the book to life - she was quite simply Lettie . They are placed next door to an established and capable couple, Adam and Jean Dell, whose apparent well-meaning advice and support turns ever more over-bearing as the book progresses.

Foxash by Kate Worsley | Hachette UK Foxash by Kate Worsley | Hachette UK

But Kate Worsley doesn’t take the obvious or ‘easy’ way forward. This book is all the more haunting because there are no supernatural explanations. Foxash is dark without the need for any otherworldly bells and whistles.Foxash' is the story of a body. 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. Lettie tills on towards the novel's climax, experiencing every grain of the narrative as a bodily perception: '[my] body feels like syrup on a spoon.' I wasn’t too sure what to expect from Foxash by Kate Worsley. It’s set in the not too distant past, in the 1930s. I was not familiar the Land Settlement Association scheme and found it really interesting reading about it. The allocation of smallholdings to the unemployed was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War through the necessity of increasing food production; favour was then given to those already with horticultural skills. After the war the Association was incorporated within the 1947 Agricultural Act for statutory provision of smallholdings designed as a first step for those going into agricultural production. And there’s an underlying darkness throughout the book and you can’t quite put your finger on why you feel uneasy. The story is set in the 1930's in England and starts with Lettie, a young married woman arriving to join her husband, Tommy, who has signed up for a government scheme ( that really did exist) to train unemployed men to farm with financial assistance and the lease on a small holding. There are hints that something happened beyond their descent into poverty after Tommy lost his mining job. Lettie arrives at Foxash farm to find their accommodation is joined to another house and set well away from the families with children in the central zone. Their neighbours are an older couple Adam and Jean who grew up farming and are seemingly in tune with the rhythms of nature. They set out to win over Lettie as they seem to have done with her taciturn husband. Jean gives Lettie a delicious lettuce and a green potion , to "build her up" which seems to have aphrodisiac and psychotropic properties. Like the Tale of Rapunzel, Lettie cannot resist Jean's lettuce and late at night is driven to steal from Adam and Jean's glasshouse.. The consequences of this theft reverberate throughout the story as the couples get to know one another better and attempt to bring forth "fruit from the land" and their characters start to be revealed..

Foxash | Kate Worsley | 9781472294876 | NetGalley Foxash | Kate Worsley | 9781472294876 | NetGalley

Lettie is a miner’s wife. As a woman, she doesn’t ask for much out of life. It’s the Great Depression, her husband has lost his job and they are penniless. Lettie is cautiously optimistic when she and her husband are granted relocation from a “Special Area” to a government-sponsored farming community. She’s grateful when the couple on the adjacent farm go out of their way to help them get established during their first farming season. Foxash LSA continued for another 15 years, until the closure of all remaining LSAs was announced in the House of Commons on 22nd December 1982. LSAs were encouraged to continue as independent companies and tenants had the right to buy their houses and smallholdings.Foxash Growers was established and operated until July 2012 (Company Number IP24049R) Most former LSA independent companies have now ceased trading – Snaith Salads, a subsidiary of Yorkshire Salads in still operational. Worn down by poverty, Lettie Radley arrives in Foxash, Essex to join her out-of-work miner husband Tommy. Their new smallholding may well be the 'fairy-tale home’ the (Land Settlement) Association promised, but she has trouble accepting the new neighbours, Jean and Adam Dell. A farmer’s life is hard to adapt to, for city folks. Lettie relies on Jean for advice yet resents it and feels humiliated to have to ask. Something about the book blurb on NetGalley made me think I would enjoy reading this book, and my thanks to the publisher for providing an ARC. As it turns out, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting and I don’t know whether that’s because I misread the description or because it was, as it felt to me, a different book to what was described.