The family makes a living from Julius’s sketchy handyman gigs, while the women tend vegetable patches and hens for eggs, the locals leaving coins in an honesty box for the produce - we are told here that people are not very honest at all. Their one escape plays up to a Cecil Sharp fever-dream with their at-home folk band, for which we get some lovely lyrics from Fuller’s musician son, Henry Ayling.

Claire Fuller’s disturbing new novel about life on the edge of society, Longlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction 2021, delivers a new side to the English writer in this pared-back story of destitute siblings finding their way.įuller has always written about tangles of crumbling landscapes, creepy houses, and questionable social constructs, and here she dives deep into the nostalgic idea that filmmaker Adam Curtis refers to as The Myth of England, exposing its pale underbelly for what it is: a cruel and unforgiving class system that preys on the vulnerable.Įccentric 51-year-old twins Julius and Jeanie are completely unequipped for the world, sheltered at home with their widowed mother Dot, who believes in this idyll of England, subsisting in a pretty but rundown cottage.

Claire fuller unsettled ground review