Critters for life's jitters

A talking fox offers solace to a struggling man in this moving story about the redemptive power of nature.

- BRIGID FEEHAN

Bobby Palmer's debut Isaac and the Egg, about a grief-paralysed widower whose life improves when he meets an ET-like creature, was a big hit. The British author's second novel also has the flavour of a modern-day fable. What makes it like a fable is not so much the - yes - talking fox, but more the novel's rhythmic prose and its sense that there can be communication between all living things.

The story centres on the relationship between city-dweller Jack, for whom "finance felt like a calling, the ultimate question to be solved", and his naturalist father Gerry who never leaves Moles End, the remote and ramshackle country home he shares with Jack's mother Hazel and sister Charlotte.

We first meet Jack when the finance sector start-up he works for goes bust. He is devastated but has no one to tell. He lived for work, has no friends and little contact with his, to him, depressingly rustic and unambitious family.

SMALL HOURS
by Bobby Palmer (Headline, $37.99)