Unsettled Ground
Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller
Reviewed by Jess
📘📘📘📘
This book has crept its way into my brain as an absolutely underrated smash. The story of twins Jeanie and Julius is one I’ve been thinking about long after I finished reading the book. Following the death of their mother, her twin children who live with her in their rural cottage have their way of life totally thrown upside down as they reckon with becoming independent and self sufficient. Complicated sibling relationships, parental lies that clearly spiralled into mental abuse, isolation and need for belonging all weave a web that it seems like they will never escape from. But Jeanie is quietly determined to find home, and you find yourself really rooting for her.
What genre is this book? I couldn’t tell you, but it’s got mystery, suspense, intrigue, psychological elements, maybe crime vibes? But it is an important story about a side of society we rarely see or talk about. Those rural isolated communities and families in the UK who live off the grid and who the authorities have long forgotten. Not part of the fabric of their local network and living in almost if not total poverty. Claire Fuller depicts their lives with such excellent and vivid writing, you can see and hear and smell everything through her words; believe me there’s a lot to smell in a certain caravan!
Fuller’s tale is, excitingly, full of surprises; what a surprise to realise the twins are 51! What a surprise to find it’s set in modern Britain through an Alexa reference? What an absolutely cracking surprise the end of the book is!! I urge you to read this unique and engaging story, and best of luck to Claire Fuller for the Women’s Prize!
