Our Endless Numbered Days
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4.1 • 34 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
An imaginative, mysterious modern fairytale from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground
1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.
Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.
'Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue' The Times
'Bewitching . . . a rivetingly dark tale' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary . . . From the opening sentence it is gripping' Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like Emma Donoghue's Room, Fuller's thoroughly immersive debut takes child kidnapping to a whole new level of disturbing. Eight-year-old Peggy Hillcoat suspects her father, James, has gone off his rocker when he builds a fallout shelter in the basement of their London home to prepare for the end of the world. But the ante is upped when, unbeknownst to his wife, he takes Peggy to an isolated, shabby log cabin in the Dutch wilderness and tells her the rest of the world has been destroyed: "On the other side there is only emptiness, an awful place that has eaten everything except our own little kingdom.... called the Great Divide." For the next nine years, the pair lives off the land as James grows increasingly fanatic and Peggy evolves from a scared and naive girl into a self-sufficient young woman. When she eventually returns to civilization alone malnourished, with rotten teeth, and deliriously rambling about someone named Reuben doctors' attempts to figure out the identity and whereabouts of the mysterious mountain man only scratch the surface of what actually happened to her and her father. Fuller alternates Peggy's time in the forest with chapters that take place in 1985 after she reunites with her mother building an ever-present sense of foreboding and allowing readers to piece together well-placed clues. Fuller's book has the winning combination of an unreliable narrator and a shocking ending.
Customer Reviews
Exceptional
This book was exceptional. It exceeded expectations and gave me a reading experience that I'm sure I will muse about in the future.
I've read distopean novels and end of the world books, my favourites being The Road and Station Eleven. This story is the distopian world for the protagonist constructed purely by the mind of her extreamest father. In a crater, lined by mountains, cliffs and trees is the setting for the bowl world. Manipulating the mind of an 8 year old girl and stunting her knowledge and combining this with her dependence on her father has been used cunningly by Fuller. Building the story from these roots created an anxiety inducing read. Fluttering between the 'present' and the past, the only certainty we have is that the protagonist lives. The rest however is hidden from us. We, like Peggy have to discover the world rimmed by the great divide, learning with her to discover the fractures in reality that her father has drawn.
An exellent read. Sure to be a best seller.
I received this book free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review