... brilliant and sly ... Inkbourne is the village, and Fuller shrewdly deconstructs romantic notions about places like this, revealing a scene closer to Gothic horror ... Julius finds them a dilapidated trailer deep in the spinney. Some of Fuller’s best writing limns the history in these chalk ridges and forests ... Fuller’s cottage stayed in my dreams, the wood range glowing.
... gorgeous, specific descriptions abound throughout the book ... That the twins are resilient is clear early on, as they stoically face their mother's death. But it's their soft spots, their desires and wishes, their memories, and their musical talent...that slowly unfold throughout the narrative, giving readers glimpses at just how rich people's lives can be even when they're small, secluded, and private. Unsettled Ground is a terribly beautiful book, and although its premise may seem quiet, it is full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end.
With a textured, naturalistic writing style [...] Ms. Fuller weaves between ordinary village life and the Seeders’ shadowy family saga, which is marked by illicit love, violence and blood debts. The close attachment to Jeanie’s and Julius’s limited points of view enrich the suspense as long-kept secrets are gradually revealed. But even the disclosures and resolutions can’t entirely domesticate Unsettled Ground, which carries its lonely, stirring music of loss to the end.
Fuller’s novels are ambitious ... Unsettled Ground takes on other singular existences with equal adroitness ... As in her other novels, Fuller explores what founding myths look like from other perspectives. Her understanding of the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep going, of the details we see but refuse to look at, allows her to produce complex, layered fictions that teach readers to be wary. Here, the treacheries of telling underpin a novel that makes the texture of poverty and homelessness palpable ... A sculptor by training, Fuller has a keen eye for how things fall apart.
Claire Fuller’s disturbing new novel...delivers a new side to the English writer in this pared-back story of destitute siblings finding their way ...
we get a subdued and quiet language, pushed down to its bare bones, in line with the empty and sparse conditions of Julius and Jeanie’s life—and maybe something to do with the book being finished in the solitude of the lockdown. She conjures that English idyll throughout, with calming descriptions of nature that then dip into the dark side ... Fuller strips back the seemingly secure system that holds the country together to show how it so completely fails those who need it most. Fuller’s novel may unearth home truths in a rural village, but boldly reflects post-Brexit England and its growing poverty, both culturally and literally, revealing, indeed, unsettled ground.
Unsettled Ground is a riposte to the notion that, with a little hard graft, lives can be turned around and fortunes changed ... [D]ivergences of ambition are some of the book’s most important junctures, but the pace slackens before a climactic final third which feels unnecessary in its drama. The novel’s successes lie in its quieter moments. Fuller displays a tenderness for her characters.
Claire Fuller’s impressive new novel opens by documenting, in fine and gravely moving detail, the last moments of an elderly woman, Dot ... 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 ... 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.
...this mother kept secrets from her children and Fuller takes her time revealing them to us. Her pacing is deliberately unhurried as she slowly builds suspense ... Several times, just when we think we know how Unsettled Ground will unfold, Fuller pulls the rug out from under us, leaving us, too, floundering to find our footing ... Fuller’s prose is often graceful, lyrical ... Fuller has a remarkable way of juxtaposing beauty with ugliness, resilience with despair, and her portrayal of these troubled but appealing siblings is as sensitive as it is powerful.
Unsettled Ground has already been published in the UK and is on the shortlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, an elite six-book group ... Fuller’s novel deserves the honor and, I suspect, will reap more now that it is out in the United States ... exquisitely detailed ... The story unfolds alternately from Julius and Jeanie’s standpoints, and the reader’s view of their characters, and that of their mother, evolves interestingly as the novel progresses ... I loved Unsettled Ground ... Part of Fuller’s brilliance is how much she gets the reader to care for them both, despite their prideful stubbornness and dangerous innocence ... what is so marvelous about Unsettled Ground is the way Fuller taps into and dramatizes the universal experience of adult children following a parent’s death.
Fuller’s novels are ambitious ... Unsettled Ground takes on other singular existences with equal adroitness ... As in her other novels, Fuller explores what founding myths look like from other perspectives. Her understanding of the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep going, of the details we see but refuse to look at, allows her to produce complex, layered fictions that teach readers to be wary. Here, the treacheries of telling underpin a novel that makes the texture of poverty and homelessness palpable ... A sculptor by training, Fuller has a keen eye for how things fall apart.
Claire Fuller’s impressive new novel opens by documenting, in fine and gravely moving detail, the last moments of an elderly woman, Dot ... 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 ... 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.
Unsettled Ground is a riposte to the notion that, with a little hard graft, lives can be turned around and fortunes changed ... [D]ivergences of ambition are some of the book’s most important junctures, but the pace slackens before a climactic final third which feels unnecessary in its drama. The novel’s successes lie in its quieter moments. Fuller displays a tenderness for her characters.
This is not the romantic portrayal of the English countryside that readers—typically American readers—are used to. Fuller’s take on this occasionally over-sentimentalized locale is far bleaker, focusing on the marginalized factions of modern-day English society that are ignored by the establishment and progressives alike ... while it’s by no means a light, happy read, Unsettled Ground is a simple but powerful story of rural poverty, sibling relationships and, perhaps above all, resilience.
This is not the romantic portrayal of the English countryside that readers—typically American readers—are used to. Fuller’s take on this occasionally over-sentimentalized locale is far bleaker, focusing on the marginalized factions of modern-day English society that are ignored by the establishment and progressives alike ... while it’s by no means a light, happy read, Unsettled Ground is a simple but powerful story of rural poverty, sibling relationships and, perhaps above all, resilience.
What happens to our secrets after death? What do we do when we discover things we never imagined—about ourselves, our families or the stories we tell to make sense of the world? These questions drive Claire Fuller’s engaging Unsettled Ground ... Even the title opens up questions, about what it means to settle or to remain unsettled, and about the nature of home and how one is made. The story exists on ground that has been disturbed by secrets and money, by the need for both independence and connection—and that ground continues to shift underfoot as the novel progresses. Readers will root for Jeanie and Julius to survive and, even more than that, to live.
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 ... It’s reassuring to think that reinvention is possible after all.
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.
For those familiar with Fuller’s work, it will come as no surprise that a secret lies at the heart of her latest tale ... 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.
