Francesca Carington

Claire Fuller’s novels specialise in secrets – her first, Our Endless Numbered Days, was about an eight-year-old whose survivalist father tells her the rest of the world has disappeared; her most recent, Bitter Orange, was about a spinster entranced by a glamorous young couple’s lives and lies. In her latest, a kind of photonegative English pastoral, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a mother’s manipulations are responsible for the titular unsettled ground.

Twins Jeanie and Julius are 51 and still live with their mother, Dot, in a tiny thatched cottage in the country. Jeanie, who sleeps in the same bed as Dot, can’t read or write, has a weak heart (or so Dot tells her), and grows vegetables which she sells at a fancy deli in the village. Julius does odd jobs locally as long as there’s no car involved – their father died in a horrific, hinted-at accident when they were 12 and engines make him sick. He’s the older twin, and “Jeanie often thinks that those 23 hours account for her and Julius’s differences: the way he embraces the world and shows his emotions, open to people and situations; while she, Jeanie, craves home, quiet and security.”

When Dot dies, it turns out she’s been keeping a lot from them: illness, a rental agreement. Jeanie and Julius are left with £3.54, and debts so large they seem “fanciful, made up”. They can’t afford the coffin, funeral or even bus tickets, and eviction looms. Jeanie, the more engaging of the two, feels anger at how her illiteracy ices her out of ordinary life; she recalls how her mother implied “that an education for the kind of people they were – poor people, country people – would only steal her away from where she belonged – at home”.

The blows of destitution crescendo into melodrama in the final act – it’s the novel’s well-realised mood of shame and guilt that’s more propulsive and affecting. Unsettled Ground examines where the fault lines lie – how a parent’s errors can reverberate through a life.