The twins also sing together, using the music to work through their grief and they’re persuaded to perform at the local pub where there’s a glimmer of what their life could be. There’s a grotesque moment when the wife of the wealthy farmer whose land their cottage sits on comes round just days after their mother’s death demanding rent arrears be paid or they’ll be thrown out, a moment juxtaposed between the description of Jeanie and the farmer’s wife’s outfits.Ĭlaire Fuller does however give us moments of joy - Jeanie finds joy in tending her garden and here’s where the reader gets brightness and colour in the novel. She has to make tough decisions between food and other home essentials, mentally considering which products could be used for multiple chores, such as washing up liquid serving to clean dishes, clothes and for washing. Jeanie has £3.54 in total, all the money she has in the world and removing 50p from that wouldn’t impact most people but for Jeanie it’s a huge proportion of all she has. Their economic situation is upsetting: when Jeanie is driven to the registry office in the next town by their mother’s friend, she’s asked if she can contribute to the parking cost. The cottage they live in is damp and rundown, there’s no electricity and Fuller vividly describes the food going off in the fridge with Jeanie imagining pouring the off milk into the tea she makes for someone.

There are a number of elements of this book that are unsettling to the reader.

The novel then follows them working out the details of their lives the impact this death has on them and the help they need from others around them. At the start of the novel, they don’t even have electricity and they have the impossible task of notifying and registering the death of their mother without a phone or transport during heavy snowfall. The twins are poorly educated, having skipped a lot of school they don’t have a bank account. It’s the only life they’ve known so when their mother suddenly dies from a stroke, the shelter she had created for them is broken and family secrets begin to be exposed. Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins who have lived their whole lives at home with their mother isolated on the edge of society in a run-down cottage, with no fixed income and being mostly self-sufficient from growing vegetables in the garden and looking after chickens. An unsettling read The Costa Novel of the Year for 2021 takes the reader to the outskirts of society, exposing deep-set family secrets and the kindness of strangers.

Claire fuller unsettled ground