The cottage is mouse-infested and the meager family savings are kept in a kitchen crock, and yet in its fertile garden there’s enough bounty for Jeanie to feed herself and her brother for a week with no more than £3 worth of store-bought food.
However, in contrast to Hadley’s lush English summer, Fuller’s England is damp and bleak.
Shrewd, unsmiling, at times gripping, the novel is a midlife coming-of-age story for two adults once thrust into a grown-up world prematurely.įans of Tessa Hadley, another one of Britain’s bestselling contemporary novelists, will immediately think of her ruminative The Past, also centered on a fragmented family’s cottage in the English countryside.
Thus begins Unsettled Ground, award-winning author Claire Fuller’s latest novel, shortlisted for the UK’s 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. If it’s possible for two fifty-one-year-olds to qualify as orphans, these twins-isolated, inhibited, distrustful of outsiders-are that. In a secluded cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, twins Jeanie and Julius wake up to find their only parent dead on the kitchen floor. Good Housekeeping named Unsettled Ground one of the best novels of the year. And when the book's big dark secret is finally exhumed, the reader feels just as cheated as its protagonists do." Kirkus Reviews provided a mixed review, saying, "At once unsettling and hopeful, checks all the boxes of an engrossing mystery, but it falters in its pacing. NPR's Ilana Masad called Unsettled Ground "a terribly beautiful book," noting that "although its premise may seem quiet, it is full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end." Nevertheless, human ingenuity persists." Shelf Awareness's Alice Martin echoed Apte's sentiment, stating, "Fuller's ability to craft nuanced and affecting characters." This tale offers a remarkable peek into how the embrace of family can completely smother other aspects of life. paints a devastatingly haunting picture of abject poverty, especially in her descriptions of the houses they dwell in, each of which becomes a character in its own right. Writing for Booklist, Poornima Apte wrote, "Fuller. Unsettled Ground received starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, as well as positive reviews from Publishers Weekly, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Shelf Awareness. Unsettled Ground is a novel by Claire Fuller, published by Tin House Books.
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