Chic, intelligent, and highly motivated - and unexpectedly unemployed. AND soon to be forty. Not a situation Katie Tremain finds easy to cope with, especially as it gives her time to notice that she and husband Ben seem to get on better together when they're apart. So when the opportunity to escape the city and work on a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere comes her way, she jumps at the challenge.
Then, one misty summer morning, she chances across something so wonderful, so bizarre that she can't believe her eyes. A fox with fur so white it sparkles, like snow. A rare, precious and very vulnerable albino vixen.
From that moment Katie's days - and her life - will change completely, the fate of her marriage becoming entwined with that of the fox as both struggle to survive.
This is a story of what happens when passion becomes obsession. Set against the wild, beautiful, often violent world of today's Exmoor, it's also a story about the power of love. And guns. And doughnuts.
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Some days when I look back, I think so what was all that about then?
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(Thornwood Books, 8 August 2011, 265 pages, ebook, copy from the author and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 14 October via @RandomTTours)
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I'd never heard of the author before but this sounded like something different than the books I usually read. I'm glad I got a chance to read this refreshingly different, emotionally intense book. Katie, the main character is really easy to connect with, she loses her job and her place in the world becomes uncertain. When she agrees to renovate a decrepit farmhouse to sell it for her husband's cousin I wanted her to succeed. The book really comes to life when she sees a fox and two cubs and becomes determined to protect them in a world where they are seen as disposable vermin. This is not just a book about man against nature. Katie is a complex character and you get insight into her insecurities and the tiny cracks in her marriage which gets wider and wider. I was engrossed in this book.
