Print of a Hare's Foot

Print of a Hare's Foot is both compelling and believable, its status as a modern classic thoroughly deserved. Davies was a writer with impeccable skills of characterisation, and the shopgirls, strikers, preachers and writers who inhabit this 'Autobiographical Beginning' emerge from the book with a powerful vitality equal to the best of his short fiction. It begins with Davies's childhood and adolescence in the Rhondda valleys, where his family are reasonably prosperous shopkeepers, distanced to a degree from the industrial strife and periodic poverty that surrounds them. Leaving life behind the counter, Davies moves to London, to the literary scene and anonymous bed-sitters in Fitzrovia. Alternatively writing and travelling during the 20s and 30s, in France he catches crabs in Nice and discusses Chekhov with D. H. Lawrence, a great friend and important influence. And in Germany, the homosexual Davies is an uneasy witness to the rise of Nazism.