While Julius hopes to reroute the course of his life and start connecting with the outside world, Jeanie is perfectly content to remain in isolation, opining that, “The different lives they might have lived are too enormous to comprehend. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world. From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, and Bitter Orange comes a brilliant novel about an unusual family held together by a string. Suddenly homeless and without the basic skills to survive in modern-day society, Jeanie and Julius are forced to reckon with the secrets their mother kept from them as they consider leaving their bubble. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. (The free rent, they assumed, was a form of reparation.)

What does surprise them is when, soon after, they receive an eviction notice from the landlord-the man the twins believe murdered their father years before. The story follows the middle-aged twins Jeanie and Julius, who discover that their mother, Dot, has died in the home they all shared. So begins Unsettled Ground, a new novel by Claire Fuller ( Bitter Orange). It’s another to be so secluded from the world that you’re 51 years old living with your elderly mother in a dilapidated cottage in the English countryside with no TV or internet, no bank account and almost no contact with the outside. It’s one thing to be raised in a sheltered environment. To an outsider, it looks like poverty to them, it is home.But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world theyve so carefully created begins to fall apart.

Claire fuller unsettled ground review