Claire Fuller’s latest novel, Unsettled Ground, follows fifty-one-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius as they struggle to manage after their mother’s sudden death. This loss inspires questions about debts, marriage, murder, and more, prompting the twins begin to wonder why their family lived such an isolated life in their small, ramshackle cottage. As the twins begin searching for answers, Jeanie in particular is forced to reconsider their collective memories as both siblings realize how little they know about their father, mother, and even themselves. The search for the truth behind one especially important secret propels the story forward, only for the reader to find the novel holds a host of such mysteries.

The questions that propel this novel center on its setting in a confined, rural English community and, more specifically, the Seeder family cottage. This cottage where the twins live is the same house where they were born and grew up. But the home is actually two neighboring structures sutured together. After their mother found out she was pregnant, their father made a deal to rent out both sides and connect them:

He knocked the two cottages together and blocked up one of the front doors so that from the gate the place has a lopsided look about it, while inside it still has two staircases, each leading to a small landing and a bedroom.

The cottage is stitched together, resulting in a home that is uneven at a glance. The family itself is also off-balance: Jeanie and Julius’s father was killed when they were young, which not only disrupted the appearance of their symmetrical family but also upset their precarious financial stability. Their mother made a deal with the landlord to let them stay in the cottage rent-free in exchange for their silence about their father’s death — and the landlord’s fault in it. After the twins’ mother dies, however, their landlord’s wife evicts them. There’s no paperwork about the deal, no record of any understanding. Jeanie and Julius are homeless.

For these characters, losing their home is a particularly tragic depiction of modern poverty. The cottage is where they came of age and settled into adulthood, and they don’t often leave. While Julius takes odd jobs helping with plumbing or building, Jeanie’s rheumatic heart disease kept her out of school often as a child and, as a result, she’s illiterate. As an adult, she’s not only unable to work outside the home, but also fearful to go out in public at all. Instead, she grows vegetables in the garden, as she did with her mother. It’s the initial description of the garden that mirrors the twins’s upbringing: “The garden is south-facing and sheltered, and the plants, which have never seen chemical fertilizers of insecticide, thrive in the loamy soil.”

The twins have grown up looking backwards, focusing on memories and shared family stories. They have been “sheltered” by the cottage, without friends, social support, or jobs outside of the home. Yet, to some extent that isolation has offered a protection from external harm, a purity similar to the garden maintained without insecticide. The twins thrived in the world inside the cottage — they are talented musicians and Jeanie is a skilled gardener. But this thriving is temporary.

The novel follows Jeanie and Julius over the next year as they navigate making new lives — through finding jobs, securing a place to live, and enduring gut-wrenching tragedies. While both twins are forced out of their comfort zones, it’s Jeanie who faces the biggest challenges, in no small part because of the lingering impacts of her childhood illness. In Jeanie, Fuller creates a character who is relatable and endearing. When she goes to register her mother’s death with the government, she checks in and waits for her appointment, reacting with awe and great feeling to the ordinary scene before her:

The waiting area in the register office is empty of people. Tinny classical music is playing and on the wall there is a large painting of flowers in a vase — lily of the valley and roses — flowers that don’t bloom at the same time. She gives her name to the woman at the desk and sits in a chair. […] Apart from the awful music — something that is meant to cover all three situations she supposes: birth, death, and marriage — it is quiet until she hears a roar coming from behind a closed door, cheering and whooping like a football crowd, and the waiting room fills up with people in bright clothes, streaming out and congratulating and clapping a couple who hold hands and laugh. Jeanie stands and smiles too, caught up in the celebration. The group leaves, their chatter fading down the street, and Jeanie is bereft, holding her breath so that she won’t cry at being left behind while the party carries on elsewhere, as always. The tinny music is audible again, and her name is called.

Jeanie’s emotional growth is so compelling that the reader remains invested in unraveling the truth about the Seeder family’s story, including the reality of Jeanie’s parents’ marriage, their relationship to their landlords, and the circumstances of both her father’s and mother’s death.

Toward the end of the novel, after she has learned the secrets that her mother had been keeping, Jeanie contemplates what she’s lost out on, what memories she has to question, and how to come to terms with it all. Fuller writes, “It is hard to rewrite your own history,” making it clear that the biggest loss Jeanie faces isn’t an external obstacle but the knowledge that reshapes her upbringing, threatens to recast her memories, and forces her to rewrite her own history — and her family’s. In this heavy, atmospheric novel, Fuller has created a propulsive story that readers can’t help but get caught up in.

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