Black Fox Running
‘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
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 in 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.