Unsettled Ground
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4.2 • 21 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2021 Costa Novel Award
Finalist for the Women's Prize in Fiction
Named a Best Book of the Month by Entertainment Weekly, PopSugar, Bustle, Chicago Review of Books, PureWow, a Best Book of Summer by Daily Beast and one of Good Housekeeping's Best Books of 2021
"Full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end." —NPR Books
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This coming-of-age story is highly unusual—not least because its protagonists are in their fifties. Raised in near isolation in a rickety cottage in the British countryside, twins Jeanie and Julius seem utterly incapable of surviving on their own after their beloved mother’s sudden death. Julius, the more social and practical of the two, wants to find work and possibly a wife, while sickly, illiterate Jeanie just wants to keep growing her vegetables and playing her guitar. Beyond the poetic beauty of author Claire Fuller’s depictions of nature, music, and grief, what really stuck with us is how intensely real she makes the twins’ predicament feel. Their unwilling introduction to the outside world includes learning many secrets their mother kept from them, threatening to tear apart their once-unshakable bond. Unsettled Ground is a deeply specific story that also resonates on a grand, archetypal level. It feels like a novel our grandchildren will read to learn about our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Unsettled Ground
I had a hard time at first getting attached to the characters. Once I got further into the story I was very interested. There were, of course, many English references that kept me researching the meanings. It was a unique storyline that I truly enjoyed.
Depressing
Weak characters but I suppose no story otherwise. Sad lives.