Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

It’s hard to say much about the plot without spoilers, so I’ll withhold them for the benefit of the reader. When Frances arrives at Lyntons, there are two other people already there: Peter, who has been commissioned to assess the condition and value of the building and its assets, and his wife, Clara. It seems like a great opportunity to move on and make some much-needed money. An American wrote to ask if she’d take on a commission to assess the architectural garden features of Lyntons, a country estate he recently purchased in Hampshire. A month after her mother’s death, a letter arrives through the Journal for Frances. Frances continues to write during this time-several of her articles were printed in a small specialty publication, Journal of the Society of Garden Antiquities. She’s a 39-year-old orphan in London who has been isolated for most of her life.Īs a child, Frances studied hard and was in her third term at Oxford when she dropped out to take care of her ailing mother. Frances’ parents split when she was a child, and she hasn’t seen her father since. She has no family or friends to turn to for comfort or help.

Her bed-ridden mother, for whom she’s been the only caretaker for the last ten years, died a month ago and she finds herself alone in the world without much money. The critical events of the novel are set in 1969 when Frances is 39 years old. The tale she tells is of a love triangle gone wrong (do those ever go right, really?) in the creepiest of places, a decaying English country manor that has sat empty since World War II, during which the Army requisitioned it. Bits and pieces of her memories from a few fateful weeks in her past are scattered through her conversation with a visitor, as are hints about her current living situation. The narrator of Fuller’s new novel, Frances Jellicot, is in her 60s in ailing health. Fuller’s first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction and her second, Swimming Lessons, was a 2017 Book of the Month selection.

From Claire Fuller - the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons - Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past.īitter Orange, Claire Fuller’s third novel, is a literary mystery that fans of Sarah Waters, Daphne Du Maurier, and Shirley Jackson won’t want to miss.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller