Our Endless Numbered Days
-
-
3.9 • 8 Ratings
-
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for Best First Novel
"Both shocking and subtle, brilliant and beautiful, a poised and elegant work that recalls the early work of Ian McEwan in the delicacy of its prose and the way that this is combined with some very dark undertones." — Desmond Elliott Prize Jury
In the tradition of Winter’s Bone and The Outlander, Our Endless Numbered Days is a powerful and mysterious debut about a father and his eight-year-old daughter who abandon their family to live alone in the forest for nine years.
In 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 life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions to prepare for the end of the world, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. She is not seen again for another nine years.
In 1985, Peggy has returned to the family home. But what happened to her in the forest? And why — and how — has she come back now? Our Endless Numbered Days is the most unputdownable and extraordinary novel you will read this year.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Peggy Hillcoat’s survivalist father destroys her world when he plucks her from society and heads for a remote abandoned cabin. In Claire Fuller’s stark, frightening, and gripping debut, the eight-year-old heroine learns to live off the land and accept her near-feral existence. Fuller immerses us in bone-chilling blizzards, persistent hunger, and the totality of Peggy’s lonely lost youth. We also find ourselves trapped alongside Peggy in her father’s dark and twisted take on Walden—wondering if a mysterious woodsman named Reuben will help free her from her father’s paranoid spell.
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.
