'Fuller is a master of building suspense. This one is worth staying with.' - Publishers Weekly '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. Nevertheless, human ingenuity persists.It's reassuring to think that reinvention is possible after all.' - Booklist (starred review) This tale offers a remarkable peek into how the embrace of family can completely smother other aspects of life. '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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

To an outsider, it looks like poverty to them, it is home.īut when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've so carefully created begins to fall apart. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. 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.Īt fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside.

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller