Read With Us: The Summer Book Announcement!

Today is the day, friends . . . Bonny and Kym and I are announcing our pick for the summer for those of you who Read With Us. And that book, without further ado, is:

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller.

Full disclosure, I have not yet read this book. I do, however, currently have it on my Kindle and I will be reading it very soon. I may even have started it by the time this post goes live.

Here’s the synopsis from GoodReads:
What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

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. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? I mean, the combination of literary fiction and suspense feels rare to me so that right there makes me want to read it. And there is also the fact that one of the characters is named Julius. Ahem. As if that all weren’t enough, it’s also on the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. Various reviews I have read have called it terribly beautiful, thrilling, moving, dramatic, unsettling, and hopeful.

It sort of sounds like everything we want in a Read With Us choice! I hope you’ll join us and read it this summer.