Our Endless Numbered Days
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
FROM THE COSTA AWARD-WINNING, WOMEN’S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF UNSETTLED GROUND
Every parent lies. But some lies are bigger than others…
In the summer of 1976 eight-year-old Peggy Hillcoat is taken from London by her survivalist father to live in a cabin in a remote European forest. When they arrive he tells Peggy that her mother and the rest of the world are gone.
Now the two of them must scratch a living from the earth: trapping squirrels, foraging for berries, surviving winter as best they can. But it is easy to lose you way in the forest, to lose yourself. How long will Peggy trust her father's story? How long can you stay sane when the world is lost? And what happens when you stop believing in everything?
‘Extraordinary’ The Sunday Times
‘Remarkable’ Penelope Lively
‘Haunting, suspenseful … As warped and sinister as any Brothers Grimm fairytale’ Metro
‘A rivetingly dark tale … Spellbinding’ Sunday Express
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.
