A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age in the aftermath of World War I. Unjustly suspected of having had a hand in the murder of a young girl, Augustine takes refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives. There his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism. The book reaches a climax with a brilliant description of the Munich putsch and a disturbingly intimate portrait of Adolph Hitler.

The Fox in the Attic, like its no less remarkable sequel The Wooden Shepherdess, offers a richly detailed, Tolstoyan overview of the modern world in upheaval. At once a novel of ideas and an exploration of the dark spaces of the heart, it is a book in which the past returns in all its original uncertainty and strangeness.

理查德‧休斯(Richard Hughes) (1900-1976)，英國著名作傢，1926年齣版第一本小說《牙買加颶風》，此書一經齣版即登上英美兩國的暢銷書排行榜，並獲得法國費米那文學奬，從此奠定他作為經典作傢的地位，此書日後更獲選為20世紀百大英文小說之一。《閣樓上的狐狸》是他繼《牙買加颶風》後創作的長篇巨獻《人性的睏惑》三部麯的第一部。