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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days which won the £10,000 (A$20,438) Desmond Elliott Prize for new fiction. This was her debut novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fuller (Bitter Orange) follows a pair of 51-year-old twins leading an extremely sheltered life in present-day rural England in this evocative and wondrously anachronistic tale. Jeanie and Julius Seeder reside in the small cottage they grew up in with their widowed mother, Dot, who's just turned 70. Upon Dot's death, the twins' lives are upended. Julius, who's made do with odd jobs, has some social savvy, while his sister, who helped her mother in their extensive garden by supplying eggs and produce to a local market, has had little contact with the outside world. Additionally, Jeanie, felled by rheumatic fever as a child, never learned to read and write, which has rendered even the most mundane tasks into almost insurmountable challenges. The precariousness of their existence comes to the fore when their landlord's wife evicts them. As the two struggle with making ends meet, another tragedy changes their lives and Jeanie comes to learn the truth behind their mother's subterfuge that kept them by her side all her life. 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. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (May)
Booklist Review
For 51 years, twins Julius and Jeanie Seeder have known only the life that their mother, Dot, zealously carved out for them. They cohabited with Dot in a crumbling cottage, growing their own food and selling some of it for the barest sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, the twins' carefully constructed worlds and associated narratives come crumbling down. Financially unstable and lacking any marketable skills, the twins are stripped bare as they face a hostile world. Worse, the mother they understood as having superpowers, turns out to be disappointingly human. The secret Dot took to her grave turns everything Julius and Jeanie knew about their lives upside down. Fuller (Bitter Orange, 2018) 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. Fuller writes of Jeanie, "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." It's reassuring to think that reinvention is possible after all.
Guardian Review
Claire Fuller's impressive new novel opens by documenting, in fine and gravely moving detail, the last moments of an elderly woman, Dot, early one snowy morning in the isolated, run-down cottage she has shared with her children, the middle-aged twins Jeanie and Julius, since the violent death of their father in an accident almost 40 years earlier. As after every death, the world to which the twins awake looks colder, emptier and stranger, but theirs is a situation complicated by a lifetime spent in seclusion. Dot has kept her children from the world, living a hand-to-mouth existence. Without internet, television or bank accounts, their pleasures have been simple: a dog for company; the garden for food and beauty; the music they make themselves. And now their home - rent-free, on a mysterious understanding with the local landowner - their livelihoods, their family history and habits, are all under threat without Dot. Within days, Jeanie and Julius find themselves facing eviction and a fabric of secrets constructed over a lifetime begins to unravel. Like Fuller's prize-winning first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, Unsettled Ground, which has been longlisted for the Women's prize, takes marginal lives as its theme. With sensitivity and intelligence, Fuller unpicks the relentless complexity of the modern world, in which mobile phones are connected to bank accounts are connected to central heating systems, and the hopeless poignancy of our longing for simplicity in the shadow of that monolithic interdependence. Wayward Julius and stubborn Jeanie resist our love as they resist the pity of the outside world: when she is taken in by her mother's friend Bridget, Jeanie's bitter, proud revulsion at every detail of her rescuer's "civilised" life - such as the enormous television screen, the grey liquid in the dishwasher, the ready meals - is so viscerally convincing that the lesson seems to be that there is no longer any place for her anywhere. But it is exactly this note of astringency, combined with Fuller's skill at evoking both the ineradicable animal pleasures - from sex to the smell of a garden after rain - and the squalid misery of sleeping rough, that gives the narrative its fierce, angry energy. Jeanie's refusal to relinquish her tenuous hold on all the things she loves carries the reader with her on a frightening and uncomfortable journey to the truth, and the possibility of starting again.
Kirkus Review
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. Misfortune runs amok in a story that can only be saved by turning the last page. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This fourth novel from the award-winning Fuller (Bitter Orange) begins with a heartrending crisis for adult twins Julius and Jeanie Seeder. Left in near poverty when their father was killed in a farm accident, they live with their mother, Dot, on an isolated English country estate. They grow the food they need and sell extra produce at the town deli and markets; Julius also contributes his day-labor wages to their meager income. Jeanie has always stayed home because of a bad heart, and she's barely literate. When Dot drops dead in the kitchen, some disturbing questions surface. Why did Dot owe money around town? Was Jeanie's heart diagnosis a lie? Why are they being told they owe back rent for their cottage, which was supposedly rent-free for life? When they are evicted, Julius relocates them to a cramped, dirty camper out in the woods, without water, plumbing, or heat; they are defenseless when locals ransack the camper. As tragedy mounts, their former landlord helps repair their lives while also revealing long-kept secrets that link his life to theirs. VERDICT A gripping, unsettling narrative that ultimately offers a journey of resilience and hope, with unforgettable results.--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The morning sky lightens, and snow falls on the 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. It hides the roof of the chicken coop, and those of the privy and the old dairy, leaving a dusting across the workbench and floor where the window was broken long ago. In the vegetable garden at the back, the snow slides through the rips in the plastic of the polytunnel, chills the onion sets four inches underground and shrivels the new shoots of the swiss chard. Only the head of the last winter cabbage refuses to succumb, the interior leaves curled green and strong, waiting. In the high double bed up the left staircase, Dot lies beside her adult daughter, Jeanie, who is gently snoring. Something different about the light in the room has woken Dot and she can't get back to sleep. She gets out of the bed -- floorboards cold, air colder -- and puts on her dressing gown and slippers. The dog -- Jeanie's dog -- a biscuit-coloured lurcher who sleeps on the landing with her back to the chimney breast, raises her head, enquiring about the early hour as Dot passes, lowering it when she gets no answer. Downstairs in the kitchen, Dot jabs at the embers in the range with the poker and shoves in a ball of paper, some kindling and a log. There is a pain. Behind her left eye. Between her left eye and her temple. Does the place have a name? She needs to go to the optician, get her eyes checked, but then what? How will she pay for new glasses? She needs to take her prescription to the chemist, but she is worried about the cost. The light is wrong down here, too. Lowing? Owing? Glowing? She touches her temple as though to locate the pain and sees through the curtains, in the gap where they don't quite meet, that it is snowing. It is the twenty-eighth of April. Her movements must have roused the dog again because now there is a scratching at the door at the bottom of the left staircase and Dot reaches out to unlatch it. She watches her hand grasping the wrought-iron, the liver spots and crosshatching seeming peculiar, unlike anything she's seen before: the mechanics of her fingers, the way the skin on her knuckles stretches over bone, bending around the handle. The articulation is alien -- the hand of an imposter. The effort of pushing on the tiny plate with her thumb seems impossible, a bodily weariness worse even than when her twins were three months old and didn't sleep at the same time, or the terrible year after they turned twelve. But with great concentration she presses and the latch lifts. The dog pokes her snout through, the rest of her body following. She whimpers and licks Dot's left hand where it hangs against her thigh, pushes nose into palm, making the hand swing of its own accord, a pendulum. The pain increases and Dot worries that the dog might wake Jeanie with her whining, Jeanie asleep in the right-hand dip in the double mattress, first made by her husband, Frank, long dead, and on the rare occasions when her children were out of the house, by that other unmentionable-at-home man, who is too long for that old short bed so he cannot stretch out, and then hollowed further by Jeanie even though she is a wisp of a thing and only ate a tiny slice of the Victoria sponge they made for when Dot herself turned seventy last month and had at the little celebration here in the kitchen with Bridget taking telephone pictures of Julius on his fiddle and she on her banjo and Jeanie on the guitar all singing after a drop of port to lubricate the vocal chords Julius always says and how the sensation Dot has now is similar to the way she felt after her third glass clumsy and blurred with her thoughts diffuse dizzily leaving the remains of the cake on the table so that dog naughty stood on her hind legs and yumphed it down and them scolding and laughing until her sides ... yurt? Kurt? all her loves but one, there with her, and the dog barking and jumping and barking too excited and noisy like she'd be in the snow waking Julius who sleeps so lightly and stirs at any noise. All these thoughts and more, which Dot is barely aware of, pass through her mind while her body slows. It is a wet coat she wants to shed like the chickens with their autumn moult. An unresponsive weight. Leaden. Dot falls back onto the kitchen sofa as though someone has reached out a palm and pushed on her breastbone. The dog sits on her haunches and lowers her head onto Dot's knee, nudging her hand until she places it between the animal's ears. And then all thoughts of chickens and children, of birthdays and beds, all thoughts of everything, vanish and are silent. The worries of seventy years -- the money, the infidelity, the small deceits -- are cut away, and when she looks at her hand she can no longer tell where she ends and dog begins. They are one substance, enormous and free, as is the sofa, the stone floor, the walls, the cottage thatch, the snow, the sky. Everything connected. 'Jeanie,' she calls but hears some other word. She isn't concerned, she has never felt such love for the world and everything in it. The dog makes a noise that isn't like any noise a dog would make and backs off, so that Dot is forced to remove her hand from the bony head. She shuffles forward on the sofa, she wants to touch the animal again, put her arms around the dog and fall inside of her. But as Dot leans, she tips, her left foot turning on its side and sliding along the floor. Her balance is upset, and she pitches face-forward, her right hand going out to break the fall, while the other catches under her chest, the finger with her wedding ring pinned beneath her. Dot's head goes down and her forehead hits the edge of the hearth where a flagstone has always been slightly raised, shifting it so that the companion set which hangs beside the range, falls. A last lucid fragment of Dot's mind worries that the clatter of the metal pan and brush might shock her daughter's heart from its regular rhythm, until she remembers that this is the biggest lie of all. The poker, which has fallen too, rolls away under the table, rocks once, twice, and then is still. Excerpted from Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
