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A beautiful lost classic of nature writing which sits alongside Tarka the Otter, Watership Down, War Horse and The Story of a Red Deer.
This is the story of Wulfgar, the dark-furred fox of Dartmoor, and of his nemesis, Scoble the trapper, in the seasons leading up to the pitiless winter of 1947. As breathtaking in its descriptions of the natural world as it is perceptive its portrayal of damaged humanity, it is both a portrait of place and a gripping story of survival.
Uniquely straddling the worlds of animals and men, Brian Carter's A Black Fox Running is a masterpiece: lyrical, unforgiving and unforgettable.
Brian Carter was an artist, poet, columnist, children's author, naturalist and broadcaster who influenced a generation of nature writers. His six novels all explore man's relationship with nature, the first of which, A Black Fox Running, was published in 1981. His art was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London and at galleries in Paris, Germany, Holland and Canada, and he had a one-man show on London's West End. He fought and won many conservation battles for the English countryside and had a great love of the natural world, particularly of Dartmoor, living in sight of it for most of his life.
Melissa Harrison's debut novel Clay won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award, was selected for Amazon's `Rising Stars' programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year for 2013. Her second novel At Hawthorn Time was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2015 and longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016. Rain, a work of non-fiction, was longlisted for the 2016 Wainwright Prize. Her new novel is All Among the Barley and will also be published by Bloomsbury. A freelance writer, occasional photographer and columnist for The Times, the Weekend FT and the Guardian, she lives in South London.
"I have never read a novel about animals and the British countryside – with the single exception of BB's The Wild Lone – which has so moved or entranced me. Never"
– John Lewis-Stempel, bestselling author of Meadowland and The Running Hare
"A Black Fox Running is really extraordinary, I've not read anything like it before. Balancing and melding animal and human worlds, this is a wholly immersive, vivid and magical book"
– Tim Pears, author of The Horseman
"A book of strange, mesmeric power. Poised, impeccably paced and observed, and brutally unsentimental. A thrilling, urgent, almost shamanic journey into the wild – including the wilderness of our own human lives"
– Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast
"A wonderful book [...] The prose is beautiful, and the story, though like nature pocked with horror, is beautiful too"
– Cynan Jones, author of Cove
"A breathtakingly beautiful novel, this lost classic of nature writing is the book that made me a writer"
– Melissa Harrison
"For those who dream of leaving behind the noise and smells of the city and breathing the clean air and adventure of the wild [...] A Black Fox Running is the thing those dreams are made of"
– Torbay News
