Claire Fuller

[b:Unsettled Ground|53341634|Unsettled Ground|Claire Fuller|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1591958345l/53341634._SY75_.jpg|74659792] is the story of a fifty-one-year-old pair of twins, Julius and Jeanie. Their mother with whom they live has died and they find themselves eking through their grief, poverty and distress gardening and doing odd jobs in their small English village. They face eviction and burglary, storms, hoodlum harassment, a shooting, secrets revealed and a satisfactory ending. I steamed through it, the reading experience I sought all through June. Leave me alone I'm reading! Well- written, suspenseful, and just the thing after some unsatisfactory experimental reads. Most contented.… (more)

This isn't going well. I think the story itself promises well. Ingrid disappears from the lives of her husband and daughters' lives when the younger daughter is only 11. She leaves behind a long series of letters hidden in among the books her husband Gil obsessively collects. In these long letters she minutely recounts details of her love affair with Gil, and her marriage, remembering with apparent total recall conversations from years ago. Really? I don't like any of the characters.

To persist, or not to persist? We'll see.

Next Day: reader, I persisted. All the comments I've already made hold good, and I finished the book. Fuller is a good observer of human foibles: our ability to say one thing and mean another, to dissemble, and to be all too blind or all too willing to see the faults of others. But I found the characters tiresome, and I was glad to finish the book. Two stars or three. Oh OK. Three then.… (more)

A novel no doubt inspired by Lockdown, in which our young heroine is incarcerated in a hospital as part of a drugs trial which isn't completed because the world at large goes into melt-down as a result of an untreatable variant of the virus rampaging round the world. Whilst there, another participant introduces her to the Revisitor, a device which allows her to re-experience her past life, which has been full of drama and error. It's all a bit odd as a device for flashback. As are her letters to H, revealing whose identity would be a spoiler alert. Unsatisfactory, uninvolving, with too many plot-lurches, this is far from Fuller at her finest.… (more)