Another engrossing book.
Entertainment Weekly
[Fuller’s] memorable characters will work their way into your head and heart.
Good Housekeeping
Fuller explores the painful realities of poverty and social isolation with immense sensitivity in this multi-layered and emotionally astute novel.
Guardian
Fuller writers agonizingly well about the poverty, and the cruelty of predatory villagers who smell fresh blood. The scenario is thick with jeopardy — just when you think things can’t get worse, they do — yet, blessedly, the climax pulls back from the abyss without losing a jot of drama. Superb.
Daily Mail
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 shows us that at any age, the unexpected can trip us up and force us to rewrite not only our present but our past.
Toronto Star
A revelatory experience … [Claire Fuller is] a novelist doing her strongest work yet … This is a powerful, beautiful novel that shows us our land as it really is: a place of shelter and cruelty, innocence and experience.
Times (U.K.)
Fuller has a keen eye for how things fall apart. Ruinous living is a theme in all her novels … But ruination is also the scene of patching up, as Fuller’s characters deploy their skills of brushing, mending, sewing, and painting. The same goes for parental manipulation. In Unsettled Ground, it is only when the big lie is revealed that renovation can commence.
Times Literary Supplement
Unsettled Ground shares with Fuller’s previous works themes of closely guarded family secrets and homes built upon shaky foundations … Fuller displays a tenderness for her characters — with all the mistakes they make or lies they tell — as well as highlighting the precariousness of even the most fervently believed truths.
Financial Times
A kind of photonegative English pastoral … Unsettled Ground examines where the fault lines lie — how a parent’s errors can reverberate through a life.
Sunday Telegraph
Impressive … 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 […] It is exactly this note of astringency, combined with Fuller’s skill at evoking sensations from the animal pleasures of sex to the misery of sleeping rough that gives the narrative its fierce energy.
Christobel Kent, Guardian
Sometimes it’s the slowest growers that have the strongest roots. A former sculptor who began writing at the age of forty, Fuller’s been quietly cultivating a devoted following throughout the publication of three psychologically sharp novels. Her fourth novel is … a dark tale, no doubt — but if you’re a reader who lives for contemplative storytelling and perfectly wrought characters, this author is for you.
BookPage, Writers to Watch
[A] stunning story … Touching on themes of love, friendship, and neighbours, [Unsettled Ground is] a powerful exploration of loneliness and isolation.
Independent
[Fuller’s] absorbing novel unsettles us with its fine evocation of life’s fragility while grounding us in the healing powers of love, loyalty, and nature’s bounty.
Irish Independent
Claire Fuller has long been a writer expert on both character and relationships. The Unsettled in the title is well chosen — there’s an unsettling edge to the world Fuller creates, but it is one that slowly, skilfully draws the reader in, weaving a captivating tale of love, resilience, and survival.
Living Magazines
This fourth novel from the award-winning Fuller begins with a heartrending crisis for adult twins Julius and Jeanie Seeder … A gripping, unsettling narrative that ultimately offers a journey of resilience and hope, with unforgettable results.
Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
Fuller paints a devastatingly haunting picture of abject poverty … 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.
Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
Fuller is a master of building suspense … At once unsettling and hopeful, her book checks all the boxes of an engrossing mystery.
Kirkus Reviews
In Unsettled Ground, Claire Fuller uncovers marginalized lives we don’t often see on the page in the rich and sensory prose that has gained her a strong following.
Isabel Costello, The Literary Sofa
