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Unsettled Ground

By claire fuller, reviewed by lily rockefeller.

In a secluded cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, twins Jeanie and Julius wake up to find their only parent dead on the kitchen floor. If it’s possible for two fifty-one-year-olds to qualify as orphans, these twins—isolated, inhibited, distrustful of outsiders—are that.

Thus begins Unsettled Ground , award-winning author Claire Fuller’s latest novel, shortlisted for the UK’s 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. 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.

Fans 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. However, in contrast to Hadley’s lush English summer, Fuller’s England is damp and bleak. 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.

Unlike the rotting fecundity of Daisy Johnson’s intensely metaphoric Oxford canals in Everything Under , in Unsettled Ground the question of money is always pressing, realistic, and stubbornly ugly. Jeanie and Julius barely have time to mourn their mother before their world falls apart more fully than they ever expected. Their wealthy landlord takes back the cottage, handing them an eviction notice with a strange allusion to their mother’s past. Jeanie discovers her mother was in debt, but the money that she borrowed is nowhere to be found. Searching for farm jobs to pay the rent, Julius is forced to relive the central trauma of his life—the day he witnessed his father’s death under tractor blades when he was twelve years old. Threatened with homelessness and hunger, burdened with heartache, the twins are forced on a journey, both inward and outward, that they never would have chosen to take.

The title of Fuller’s novel itself calls to mind the double-edged sword of rootedness. Even as Jeanie pulls up ruby-red radishes from the garden planted by her mother and Julius sings regional folk music passed down for generations, so too do they inherit a past whose devastating secrets run deep—and they find themselves rooted to the spot, with nowhere to run.

Fuller’s prose lies at the intersection of artlessness and artistry: unadorned but mature, avoiding the lyrical but, much like the graveness of the twins, full of its own dignity. While their isolated upbringing makes the twins hard to empathize with at first, I was impressed watching Jeanie’s evolution from reactive but timid shut-in to formidable and sensitive fighter. When Jeanie is forced to venture out into the nearest town to register her mother’s death, for example, Fuller nonchalantly captures their admirable self-reliance and their naiveté:

Tinny classical music is playing and on the wall there is a large painting of flowers in a vase—lily of the valley and roses—flowers that don’t bloom at the same time. She gives her name to the woman at the desk and sits in a chair. They are the same chairs in style and upholstery as the ones in the surgery waiting room. Perhaps waiting room chairs are the same across the country, across the world; perhaps one company has a corner on the sales of waiting room chairs.

Although I had figured out the central mystery of the novel just a quarter of the way through, far from being a letdown, its obviousness becomes a skillful indication of the twins’ stubborn refusal to face their mother’s secrets. And while its simplicity may suggest the story is more character-driven than plot-focused, the novel’s unpretentiousness makes it a page-turner and even a quasi-thriller—a rare feat for a literary novel. Literary but readable, reflecting the humble beauty of country life in every page, Unsettled Ground will appeal to a wide array of readers.

Published on July 2, 2021

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Book Reviews

'unsettled ground' lets its oddballs stay defiantly odd.

Ilana Masad

Every small town (and every neighborhood in every city) has its oddballs, the people who live on the fringes, a little out of step with everyone else. Fairy tales sometimes cast them as witches, or as beautiful young royals cursed to live as beasts. Children's books often redeem them with some lesson about how outsiders are just like everyone else, despite their strange appearances or ramshackle houses or mysterious actions.

But how often, in our stories, are oddballs allowed to remain exactly who they are? How often do they take center stage as main characters and reorient our view of what is "normal"? How often are such characters given rich, complex, and interior lives, complete with sorrows, talents, opinions, and flaws? Claire Fuller 's new novel, Unsettled Ground , does just that.

The opening pages of the novel are chock full of glorious descriptive language. It's late April in an English village and unseasonal snow is falling on a cottage: "It falls on the thatch, concealing the moss and the mouse damage, smoothing out the undulations, filling in the hollows and slips, melting where it touches the bricks of the chimney. It settles on the plants and bare soil in the front garden and forms a perfect mound on top of the rotten gatepost, as though shaped from the inside of a teacup." Such gorgeous, specific descriptions abound throughout the book.

'Bitter Orange' Keeps The Tension Simmering

Dot, a 70-year-old woman, dies in the first chapter, and the rest of the novel is concerned with her twin children who are 51. These twins, Jeanie and Julius, have lived all their lives in this cottage on the outskirts of the village, Inkbourne, with their mother. Why are they still living at home? Why did they never leave? These are the first questions readers will likely have, and over the course of the book, they will discover a multitude of answers, some of which are hinted at in the opening pages alongside secrets that Dot has taken with her to her grave.

Jeanie and Julius, these fully-grown adults living with their mother, are clearly considered odd in the village. Their cottage doesn't have a phone or a television or a computer, although it does have a sizeable garden that Jeanie and Dot spent their years tending to, while Julius picked up odd jobs. His cellphone is the only concession to modern technology, but it's an ancient kind that needs to be reloaded with credit every once in a while, and he only has it so that employers can call him. Other oddities: the family's old-fashioned clothes, Dot's refusal to receive government assistance, the family's lack of a bank account, the twins' antipathy toward their farmer neighbor on whose land the cottage sits, and the fact that neither Jeanie nor Julius have ever seemed to have any real friends, let alone romantic relationships.

The twins are not unaware of their difference. As they begin to deal with the bureaucracy of death — the doctor that needs to declare the death, forms that need filling out, certificates necessary for burial, etc. — Dot's best friend, Bridget, as well as other community members keep asking about a wake. Jeanie doesn't want one, disgusted by the "thought of people milling about the kitchen, the babble of them, the way they would stare at her and Julius: pitying the weirdos who still lived with their mother at age fifty-one."

New hardships befall Jeanie and Julius immediately after Dot's death. It starts with money; they haven't got any. Dot had always told them the cottage was theirs, rent-free, forever, in exchange for their silence regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of their father when they were 12. But now, suddenly, they learn they owe rent on it, that their mother appears to have been secretly paying rent for years. They also learn she was sick before she died, which she never mentioned to them, and that she borrowed money from Bridget's husband, which they now have to pay back.

Soon, because they haven't paid their electricity bill, the power is shut off. Days later, they're threatened with eviction. Meanwhile, Jeanie has known since she was a child that she has a heart condition due to a bout of rheumatic fever, and so has never had a job, and Julius can't work too far away because any extended amount of time in a moving vehicle makes him violently ill. How are they to survive?

That the twins are resilient is clear early on, as they stoically face their mother's death. But it's their soft spots, their desires and wishes, their memories, and their musical talent (Julius plays fiddle, Jeanie the guitar, and Dot had played banjo) that slowly unfold throughout the narrative, giving readers glimpses at just how rich people's lives can be even when they're small, secluded, and private.

Unsettled Ground is a terribly beautiful book, and although its premise may seem quiet, it is full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end.

Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her debut novel is All My Mother's Lovers .

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UNSETTLED GROUND

by Claire Fuller ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2021

Misfortune runs amok in a story that can only be saved by turning the last page.

In Fuller’s fourth novel, when one thing is buried, another is unearthed.

For those familiar with Fuller’s work, it will come as no surprise that a secret lies at the heart of her latest tale. Based in rural England, the novel opens in a dilapidated cottage with the unceremonious death of a woman named Dot. She’s found that morning by her grown twin children, Jeanie and Julius, who are 51 years old and have lived with her all their lives. While the death of their mother isn’t a shock, it’s what follows that unnerves the twins. Apparently, there were debts their mother had accrued, and apparently everyone in town knew except Jeanie and Julius. No sooner do they bury Dot than they receive an eviction notice from the landlord, a man who the twins believe murdered their father. As far as they understood, their mother was given free rent as some sort of twisted reparation for their loss. Now homeless and jobless, the twins scramble to find work and shelter, which isn’t easy for “poor people, country people” like them, especially with Jeanie’s weak heart. They eventually land on their feet, even finding time to pick their shared love of music back up, but it doesn’t take long for the past to catch up to them. Fuller is a master of building suspense. At once unsettling and hopeful, her book checks all the boxes of an engrossing mystery, but it falters in its pacing. And when the book's big dark secret is finally exhumed, the reader feels just as cheated as its protagonists do.

Pub Date: May 18, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-951142-48-3

Page Count: 330

Publisher: Tin House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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LONG ISLAND

by Colm Tóibín ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2024

A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.

An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.

At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.

Pub Date: May 7, 2024

ISBN: 9781476785110

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller review — a beautiful, powerful tale about real country life

Oh, to be in England, now that April’s (almost) there! You don’t have to have been imprisoned at home for the past year to thrill at the thought of meadows bursting into flower, bees buzzing around country lanes and church clocks standing at ten to three. Of course the joys of the countryside are more often mediated through the books we love than direct experience. Is your rural Britain a place of dark mythical beasts, like Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent ? Or a happy jumble of cider and blue tits as per HE Bates? Do its village greens swarm with murderers or mummers?

Claire Fuller is the latest novelist to take stock of country life and, as we have come to expect from this

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Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller audiobook review – secrets and survival

A deft version of the Costa prize winner about rural, middle-aged twins whose sheltered lives are shattered by their mother’s death

C laire Fuller’s Costa prize-winning novel begins with 70-year-old Dot getting up in the night in her farm cottage and collapsing from a stroke by the kitchen hearth. Her body is found in the morning by her two adult children who face an uncertain future in the wake of her death.

Twins Jeanie and Julius are 51 years old and have led desperately sheltered lives, never venturing far from home, living off the land and eschewing modern necessities such as bank accounts, television and the internet. Unsettled Ground provides a richly detailed portrait of two outsiders out of step with the world and forced to confront the lies their late mother told to keep them at home. As well as showing the siblings’ emotional implosion, Fuller depicts the harsh realities of life in a remote rural community where work is scarce and many live in dire poverty.

Reader Rachel Bavidge – who has narrated works by Paula Hawkins and Adele Parks, and Fuller’s own Bitter Orange – deftly gives voice to Jeanie and Julius, capturing their frustration and heartbreak as they realise the scale of their mother’s deception, as well as the peripheral figures who variously help and hinder their journey towards a new life. These include Dot’s old friend Bridget, who provides emotional support as the twins deal with the bureaucracy of bereavement; Spencer Rawson, the wealthy neighbour whose cottage they live in and who threatens them with eviction; and the family doctor who delivers some shocking news that causes Jeanie to reassess not just her mother but her entire existence.

Unsettled Ground is available from Penguin Audio, 9hr 29min.

Further listening

Damn Shame David Pevsner, Random House Canada, 11hr 5min The actor David Pevsner reads his eye-wateringly candid memoir, looking back on his career during which he supplemented his screen and stage income by working as a male escort.

White Debt Thomas Harding, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 10hr 8min Ben Onwukwe and Mark Meadows narrate this sensitive account of the uprising of enslaved people in Demerara (now part of Guyana) in 1823, and the role of the author’s ancestors in colonialist oppression.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, unsettled ground.

Morning. An April snowfall. A ramshackle cottage in the English countryside. In the opening scene of UNSETTLED GROUND, 70-year-old Dot narrates her own lonely death, and then the perspective shifts to that of her twin children, Jeanie and Julius, who have dwelled with her in this house all their lives. They are now 51 years old, with a very marginal connection to schools, shops, regular jobs, bank accounts and medical care --- all the markers of modern, conventional society. They are literally babes in the wood. Claire Fuller will show us their struggle to grow up.

This is not the first time Fuller has created characters who abandon civilization, so called, for the wilderness. OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS, the British writer’s remarkable debut novel about a girl and her obsessive survivalist father, won the UK’s Desmond Elliott Prize. The mother in UNSETTLED GROUND, Fuller’s fourth novel, is more benign, if not entirely blameless. Although Dot dies in the first few pages, her spirit, her courage, her ingenuity --- and, it turns out, her many secrets and deceits --- dominate the book.

UNSETTLED GROUND has already been published in the UK and is on the shortlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, an elite six-book group that also includes Patricia Lockwood’s NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS, TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM by Yaa Gyasi, and Brit Bennett’s THE VANISHING HALF. Fuller’s novel deserves the honor and, I suspect, will reap more now that it is out in the United States.

"[W]hat is so marvelous about UNSETTLED GROUND is the way Fuller taps into and dramatizes the universal experience of adult children following a parent’s death."

If you have a yen for fantasies of rural coziness, UNSETTLED GROUND is not your ideal read. The Seeder family (the name is apt) subsists on the proceeds from the sale of eggs, vegetables and fruit, plus odd jobs Julius finds in the immediate area (he gets carsick in any moving vehicle and can’t go far). Fuller doesn’t romanticize the back-breaking labor required to keep things going: the garden, the chickens, the fire that must never be allowed to go out. Yet her exquisitely detailed descriptions of the work Jeanie and Dot once did side by side and that she must now do alone --- making a rabbit pie, potting tomato seedlings, clearing nettles from the garden with a scythe --- have their own kind of beauty and pathos. And the mournful folk ballads the family is fond of playing and singing form a counterpoint to the unforgiving demands of their life.

The twins’ existence is fragile: One illness or injury, one loss, one snowstorm, one threat, one debt, and they teeter on the edge of the abyss. Shortly after their mother’s death, Julius and Jeanie receive an eviction notice from their affluent farmer neighbor, who owns the land. How and where they will live if that happens becomes the pivot for Fuller’s suspenseful and heartbreaking plot.

The story unfolds alternately from Julius and Jeanie’s standpoints, and the reader’s view of their characters, and that of their mother, evolves interestingly as the novel progresses. At first, Julius seems more worldly, more mature. He gets away from the cottage for work, goes to the local pub, has a cell phone, and acquires a girlfriend of sorts. Jeanie, on the other hand, is functionally illiterate and far more isolated. Told at age 13 by her mother that she has a heart condition, she has remained tucked away at home ever since.

Gradually, though, as Jeanie is forced to take on some of the “outside” tasks that her mother performed, like going to the village shop, she emerges as the stronger person. Julius is a bit feckless; he likes his pint and his roll-up cigarettes, and while he yearns for someone to love, he is clumsy at courtship. Jeanie turns out to be surprisingly brave and steady. She makes a home of sorts in the most desperate of circumstances, stands up to bullies, and even manages to find a paid gardening job: “The idea of doing work other than looking after her own house and garden makes her feel like something inside her, as tiny as an onion seed, is splitting open, ready to send out its shoot.”

Our picture of Dot changes most of all. It soon becomes clear that after she was widowed some 40 years ago, this apparently self-sufficient woman was in dreadful fear of being alone. To keep the children with her, she lied: about her husband’s death, Jeanie’s health, Julius’ responsibility as the man of the family. She bound them all to this intimate but cloistered life. 

I loved UNSETTLED GROUND. The one flaw in the novel, in my opinion, comes in the final chapters. Fuller jumps ahead a year and busies herself tying up every possible loose end. Money and security and friendship seem to arrive as if by magic, mainly through the good offices of Bridget, a generous if annoying friend of their mother; Jeanie’s bohemian employer, Saffron; and the neighbor, Rawson, who had a secret history with Dot.

I wasn’t sorry to see some prosperity come Jeanie and Julius’ way after all they’ve been through. Part of Fuller’s brilliance is how much she gets the reader to care for them both, despite their prideful stubbornness and dangerous innocence. But in this case, I think the ending slightly undermines the subtlety of the rest of the book. I wanted the conclusion to be less neat, more fluid.

That aside, what is so marvelous about UNSETTLED GROUND is the way Fuller taps into and dramatizes the universal experience of adult children following a parent’s death. Like all of us, Jeanie and Julius grow up with an edited version of reality; it is only after Dot is gone that they can let go of the story they’ve told themselves --- or that’s been told to them --- about their lives.

It’s heartening that Jeanie at least finally gets a chance to part ways with the past and find her own truth.

Reviewed by Katherine B. Weissman on May 22, 2021

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

• Publication Date: April 26, 2022
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Tin House Books
• ISBN-10: 1953534171
• ISBN-13: 9781953534170

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Claire Fuller - Unsettled Ground

“prepare for an experience of the english countryside that’s somewhat at odds with its typically idyllic depiction. . . . as the title suggests, at each turn there’s something new and unexpected.”, no major spoilers.

Just finished Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller. This book is the story of twins, Jeanie and Julius who are in their early fifties and live in a small cottage and farm. They live with their mother Dot. Their father died in an accident on the farm many years before and the three have stayed together, Jeanie, because of her health stays home with Dot, helping her around the farm while Julius gets day work helping out doing odd jobs here and there.

Dot dies suddenly, throwing the twins lives into a sudden drastic change. Now they find out so many of the things their Mother held back from them. She didn’t tell them about her bad health and she didn’t tell them about the many debts she had accrued, debts that the twins will not be able to pay off.

The story now becomes one of how these twins will survive on their own, being quite sheltered for most of their lives. The many surprises awaiting them will affect both of their lives together. While being a very sad book in many ways, it’s also a story of love and devotion, and a story of how big changes can affect even the strongest of relationships. Well written, this is a very powerful story well worth reading.

Reviewed by:

Richard franco.

Added 3rd September 2021

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Unsettled Ground : Book summary and reviews of Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Unsettled Ground

by Claire Fuller

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Published May 2021 330 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

From the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days , Swimming Lessons , and Bitter Orange comes a brilliant novel about an unusual family held together by a string of lies, a small town with too many questions, and a sudden death that threatens to undo them all.

At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've so carefully created begins to fall apart. The cottage they love, and the security it offered, is taken back by their landlord, exposing the twins to harsh truths and even harsher realities. Seeing a new future, Julius becomes torn between the loyalty he feels towards his sister and his desire for independence, while Jeanie struggles to find work and a home for them both. And just when it seems there might be a way forward, a series of startling secrets from their mother's past come to the surface, forcing the twins to question who they are, and everything they know of their family's history. In Unsettled Ground , award-winning author Claire Fuller masterfully builds a tale of sacrifice and hope, of homelessness and hardship, of love and survival, in which two marginalized and remarkable people uncover long-held family secrets and, in their own way, repair, recover, and begin again.

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"Fuller 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. This tale offers a remarkable peek into how the embrace of family can completely smother other aspects of life. Nevertheless, human ingenuity persists...It's reassuring to think that reinvention is possible after all." - Booklist (starred review) "[E]vocative and wondrously anachronistic...Though some readers may struggle to find their footing in the somewhat amorphous setting, Fuller builds suspense over the twins' fate and ends with a brilliant twist. This one is worth staying with." - Publishers Weekly "Fuller is a master of building suspense. At once unsettling and hopeful, her book checks all the boxes of an engrossing mystery, but it falters in its pacing. And when the book's big dark secret is finally exhumed, the reader feels just as cheated as its protagonists do. Misfortune runs amok in a story that can only be saved by turning the last page." - Kirkus Reviews "Revelatory...a powerful, beautiful novel." - The Times (UK) "So sharply, so utterly brilliant that I found myself holding my breath while reading, dazzled by Fuller's mastery and precision." - Lauren Groff "Fuller's prose is darkly elegant, her eye for character astute and humane, and her sense of place vividly atmospheric—here is a writer of great skill, sensitivity, and subtlety." - Lucy Atkins

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Claire Fuller Author Biography

For first degree, Claire Fuller studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She began writing fiction at the age of 40, after many years working as a co-director of a marketing agency, she received a Masters degree (distinction) in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Winchester. Claire is the author of Unsettled Ground (2021), winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Bitter Orange (2018), Swimming Lessons (2017), which was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for second novels, and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) which won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. She live near Winchester, England with her husband and a cat called Alan, and has two grown-up children.

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Unsettled Ground: Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021 Hardcover – 25 Mar. 2021

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WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2021 'Her strongest yet... a powerful, beautiful novel that shows us our land as it really is: a place of shelter and cruelty, innocence and experience' THE TIMES 'The way she writes (with empathy but never sentimentality) moves my heart' ELIZABETH DAY, author of Magpie 'Dark, brilliantly observed and ultimately a tale of love winning the day.' THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH When you live on the edge of society, it only takes one step to fall between the cracks Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Inside the walls of their old cottage they make music, and in the garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. Jeanie and Julius would do anything to preserve their small sanctuary against the perils of the outside world, even as their mother's secrets begin to unravel, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. Unsettled Ground is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness. 'A relevant and powerful exploration of isolation and life on the fringes of society' CLARE MACKINTOSH, author of Hostage 'An atmospheric thriller that's both heartbreaking and heartwarming' RED

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Fig Tree
• Publication date 25 Mar. 2021
• Dimensions 14.4 x 2.9 x 22.2 cm
• ISBN-10 0241457440
• ISBN-13 978-0241457443
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fig Tree (25 Mar. 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241457440
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241457443
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.4 x 2.9 x 22.2 cm
• 30,073 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• 35,720 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
• 43,656 in Thrillers (Books)

About the author

Claire fuller.

Claire Fuller is the author of Unsettled Ground (2021), winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Bitter Orange (2018), Swimming Lessons (2017), which was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for second novels, and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) which won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. www.clairefuller.co.uk

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Claire Fuller

Unsettled ground.

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021.

“A beautiful, powerful tale about real country life.” The Times

“Fierce, angry energy…. Claire Fuller’s impressive new novel opens by documenting, in fine and gravely moving detail, the last moments of an elderly woman.” The Guardian

“A brilliant and sly study of family in a rural English cottage,” Los Angeles Times

My fourth novel, Unsettled Ground won the Costa Novel Award 2021 and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. It is published in the UK, US, Lithuania, Spain, Catalonia, and The Netherlands It will also be published in Poland, France, Turkey, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Slovenia, and Germany.

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always known they are different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation. The cottage they have rented for their whole lives is simultaneously their armour and their provider. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need to survive. To an outsider it looks like poverty but, to them, it is home .

But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the twins are exposed to a truth that has far-reaching repercussions, and as members of the local community start to make things difficult for the twins, Jeanie wonders how they will cope in a world which can be cruel and unyielding.

 A portrait of rural poverty in the 21 st Century, Unsettled Ground forces readers to see beyond the unsavoury, the unconventional, the ‘other’ and to recognise the thing that unites us all: the beating heart beneath. This is a story of resilience and hope, of homelessness and hardship, of love and survival, in which two marginalized but remarkable people take centre stage.

Articles and interviews I’ve written a lot of articles, answered many Q&As, and been interviewed for some wonderful authors for Unsettled Ground. Click here to see some of them.

Buy Unsettled Ground

Unsettled Ground is available to buy as a hardback (UK and US), ebook or audio book. Click here to buy in the UK. Click here to buy in the US. Click here to buy in Canada.

If you’d like to be kept up to date about Unsettled Ground (publication territories, covers, and competitions) please sign up to my newsletter . If you’d like book club questions for Unsettled Ground, get in touch .

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Unsettled Ground Paperback – January 1, 2022

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• Print length 287 pages
• Language English
• Publisher PENGUIN
• Publication date January 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.12 x 0.71 x 7.76 inches
• ISBN-10 0241457467
• ISBN-13 978-0241457467
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ PENGUIN (January 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 287 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241457467
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241457467
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 0.71 x 7.76 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #1,861,835 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Claire fuller.

Claire Fuller is the author of Unsettled Ground (2021), winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Bitter Orange (2018), Swimming Lessons (2017), which was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for second novels, and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) which won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. www.clairefuller.co.uk

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