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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“If there’s one book you pick up this summer, make it this one.” – Washington Post
“A wise and intimate book about a solitary woman, a biologist by training, who befriends a fox.” – Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi
Catherine Raven has lived alone since the age of 15. After finishing her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana, in a place as far away from other people as possible. She viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society.
Then one day she realises she has company: a mangy-looking fox who starts showing up at her house every afternoon at 4.15pm. She has never had a visitor before. How do you even talk to a fox? She brings out her camping chair, sits as close to him as she dares, and begins reading to him from The Little Prince. Her scientific training has taught her not to anthropomorphise animals, yet as she grows to know him, his personality reveals itself and the two form a powerful bond – shaken only when natural disaster threatens to destroy their woodland refuge.
Fox and I is a story of survival and transformation, a captivating tale of a friendship between two species in a shared habitat, battling against the uncontainable forces of nature on one side and humanity on the other – immersive, original and utterly unforgettable.
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Reviews
A tender, shrewd exploration of the redemption that comes when we start to know that we, whoever and wherever we are, are wild things, crucially defined by our relationship with the wild.
A wise and intimate book about a solitary woman, a biologist by training, who befriends a fox. More than that, it's the tale of a human mind trained to be logical being touched by nature and coming to realize a greater truth. If Thoreau had read The Little Prince, he would have written Fox and I.
Intimate and poetic . . . . By paying ecstatic attention to grasses, insects, birds, and animals, Catherine Raven allows us to hear what nature is saying to us. Fox and I is essential reading for anyone concerned about the catastrophe human beings are inflicting on the environment from which they and all other creatures sprang.
This tale of wilderness, in the tradition of Thoreau and Steinbeck, is distinguished by a narrator who sees herself as one of the many creatures she lives among . . . . Catherine Raven has achieved something unique in the literature of nature-writing: genuine love for the wild within the rigor of scientific observation. The voice of this storyteller is startlingly original. I read it breathlessly.
The observations of high-desert nature -- of wildlife, plants, landscapes, weather -- in this book are some of the best you will ever read. The story of Catherine Raven's and the fox's friendship charmed me and drew me in completely.
Fox and I is a mesmerizing, beautifully written, and entirely unsentimental book about the connection amongst all things: the author and her fox friend, but also magpies, brown dogs, fawns, voles, and junipers. Catherine Raven helped me reorient myself in the universe; she encourages readers to stop, listen, and look at the landscapes around us without putting ourselves in the center of them. I learned as much about the meaning of friendship from this book as I have from any work of nonfiction that I've ever read.
A smart and tender memoir of an unexpected bond between a biologist and a fox... Fox & I crisply upends the hierarchy that places humans at the top of a pyramid.