Reader Score
77%
77% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 18 reviews on
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.
Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; and Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.
www.clairefuller.co.uk
Justine Jordan is the Guardian's deputy literary editor.
Loving the slowburn journey of Claire Fuller's Unsettled Ground to Costa novel of the year - here's our review from last Spring https://t.co/w56TJgufRg
Ilana Masad is a writer and book critic.
RT @splitlipthemag: Contributor @ilanaslightly reviewed Claire Fuller's UNSETTLED GROUND for @NPR: https://t.co/UdINdH0VSY https://t.co/Bs4…
i rant a lot, enjoy this helluva ride idontknow why people follow this twitter
yknow what I actually enjoyed this book (Unsettled Ground by claire fuller) and spent only 2 long sessions reading it https://t.co/Tlmg4tLsK7