Unsettled Ground: Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2021
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By Claire Fuller
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2 reviews
WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2021
‘Her strongest yet… a powerful, beautiful novel that shows us our land as it really is: a place of shelter and cruelty, innocence and experience’ THE TIMES
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When you live on the edge of society, it only takes one step to fall between the cracks
Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Inside the walls of their old cottage they make music, and in the garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. Jeanie and Julius would do anything to preserve their small sanctuary against the perils of the outside world, even as their mother’s secrets begin to unravel, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.
Unsettled Ground is a powerful novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.
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‘The way she writes (with empathy but never sentimentality) moves my heart’ ELIZABETH DAY, author of Magpie
‘A relevant and powerful exploration of isolation and life on the fringes of society’ CLARE MACKINTOSH, author of Hostage
‘An atmospheric thriller that’s both heartbreaking and heartwarming’ RED
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Macclesfield Library Reading Group
** spoiler alert ** Thank you to Penguin and The Reading Agency for providing free copies of the books for us to review. Overall, we thought this was a good book – somewhat bleak, downbeat and melancholy but still quite a pacy and easy read. The thing that kept coming up most often was how terrible a person Jeanie and Julius’ mother was. She was devious and cruel and her presence pervaded the entire novel, despite her death being the very first thing that happens. The reader is made to feel sorry for Dot early on in the novel and then the true extent of her manipulation starts to be revealed. We found it really interesting that Jeanie began to replicate the role of her mother in a way. For much of the book, Jeanie doesn’t want Julius to have a life of his own and leave her to get married (this was never going to happen with Shelley Swift but Julius didn’t know that) but then Julius gets shot and the twins end up being forced to stay together anyway. In fact, Julius is the most tragic character because he doesn’t have much of a life at all by the end of the book. There did appear to be some hope for Jeanie and Julius when they were asked to play a gig at the pub, and it started to look like there might be a way out of poverty for them. We felt that Jeanie was the one who had more musical talent and, without the hindrance of her fake heart condition, she could have made a name for herself, but sadly it all came to nothing. Jeanie didn’t help herself though. For instance, when she goes to register the death, she refuses to accept help because she’s so frightened of people discovering she can’t read or write properly. The stigma of illiteracy is so prevalent in Jeanie’s life that she allows herself to be taken advantage of again and again. We spoke about how some people do live in the levels of poverty depicted here, living almost completely separate from the rest of society. Certain aspects of Jeanie and Julius’ lives stretched the imagination, for example, the extent to which they lived off the grid – no bank accounts, no welfare assistance, no basic life skills etc. Had the novel been set in the 1940s, it would have felt much more believable, but it is possible in this day and age, for people to fall through the cracks, and this is exactly what happened in this case, albeit with some help from the mother!
a tale of 2 siblings age 50, held back by their mother, lost and unequipped to manage when she dies. Beautifully written you feel frustration at their loss and how ill equipped their mother left them. ultimately this is a tale of survival and hope.
