The judgement – or lack, thereof – is one of Unsettled Ground’s greatest attributes. Not put any put any judgment on them and the way they live their lives and the choices they make, just try and have some empathy.” How does that happen? What is their life like?” What’s imperative, she says, is “to let them speak for themselves.
People who are 51 and still live with their mother, I think, are really interesting people. “Oddballs, eccentrics, however you want to call them: these are people that interest me. “I do like to write about outsiders,” says Fuller.
What unravels in the wake of Dot’s death are secrets and lies as the twins attempt to forge a kind of life without her. But when Dot dies one morning, Jeanie and Julius are left unmoored. What they do have is one another: mother and offspring played folk music together, on fiddle and guitar and banjo. They don’t have bank accounts or a landline, they barely have a complete school education Jeanie is illiterate, a mysterious heart condition having kept her shuttered away from the world since childhood. Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins living in poverty, and largely out of sight of society, in the dilapidated cottage their mother raised them in. Her latest novel Unsettled Ground, which has won the 2021 Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, is no different. Oddballs, eccentrics, however you want to call them: these are people that interest me From 1970s teenager Peggy Hillcoat and her survivalist father James in Our Endless Numbered Days, Fuller’s 2015, Desmond Elliot Prize-winning debut, to the ailing Frances Jellico, narrator of Bitter Orange, Fuller brings people to the page who we read about with fascination. The novelist writes novels so steeped in foreboding that reading them feels like the thick air of a hot, midsummer’s day before a thunderstorm, but it’s her characters who are truly unforgettable. You could say the same about Fuller’s books. “It’s always the people, even if they’re pulling a face or think they’re having a bad hair day.” “What we’ve discovered is, when we look back through photos, you can take a really beautiful photo of a sunset or the sea, but it’s the pictures of people we want,” she tells me, from her home office in Winchester. On the afternoon we speak, the author shared images from 2021’s album online. At the end of the year, they bind them into a book. For the past seven years, Claire Fuller and her husband, a librarian, have taken a photo every single day.
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