Foxlight
Katya Balen
*** WINNER OF THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CHILDREN'S WRITING ***
From the author of October, October, winner of the Yoto Carnegie Medal, comes a heartbreaking and heart-warming story about sisterhood, found family and accepting love in the most unusual and unknown places.
Fen and Rey were found curled up small and tight in the fiery fur of the foxes at the very edge of the wildlands. Fen is loud and fierce and free. She feels a connection to foxes and a calling from the wild that she's desperate to return to. Rey is quiet and shy and an expert on nature. She reads about the birds, feeds the lands and nurtures the world around her.
They are twin sisters. Different and the same. Separate and connected. They will always have each other, even if they don't have a mother and don't know their beginning. But they do want answers. Answers to who their mother is and where she might be. What their story is and how it began. So when a fox appears late one night at the house, Fen and Rey see it as a sign - it's here to lead them to their truth, find their real family and fill the missing piece they have felt since they were born.
But the wildlands are exactly that: wild. They are wicked and cruel and brutal and this journey will be harder and more life changing than either Fen or Rey ever imagined ...
Product Details
About Katya Balen
Reviews for Foxlight
The Times
Beautifully poetic and steeped in the natural world
Sainsbury's Magazine
Beautifully written
The Week Junior
Quietly wild, richly thoughtful
The Guardian
Some books are set out as verse but never achieve the poetic. Foxlight is set out as prose, but has the depth of poetry.
The Jewish Chronicle
Quite simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever read
Kiran Millwood Hargrave on October, October
Katya Balen’s October, October is a very special new addition to the shelf and deserves classic status
Times Children's Book of the Week on October, October
It's EXQUISITE. Read it. Wild yourself. Open your heart to it. Written with the pen of a poet and the soul of Mother Earth. Glorious. It's like nothing else I've ever read.
Liz Hyder, award-winning author of Bearmouth on October, October
I love Katya Balen’s clear-eyed, poetic writing style, first encountered in The Space We’re In and October, October. She has a special ability to dig deep into the emotional lives of the children she writes about; she is always privy to their darkest thoughts, always on their side. Original, compulsive, uplifting: this is another triumph for Balen.
The Times Children's Book of the Week on The Light in Everything
I loved this book. The deftness with which Katya creates such passionate, funny, broken, brave characters. What an achievement. Katya Balen can break your heart and make you snort with laughter in the same sentence
Natasha Farrant on The Light in Everything
Balen writes with sensitivity, highlighting how difficult change can be for a young person while ultimately creating an uplifting story
The Week Magazine on The Light in Everything