Guest Editor, Claire Fuller

We are absolutely delighted to be able to welcome award-winning author Claire Fuller as our Guest Editor. You can read about her awards below, but her books don’t just please judges, they also appeal far and wide to readers. Claire has been a favourite author of mine since her Desmond Elliott Prize winning Our Endless Numbered Days in 2015. I love Claire’s writing, she has the ability to take you to well known yet entirely unexpected places within the human soul and your own subconscious. Her descriptions almost bruise as they land with apparently effortless precision. Our Endless Numbered Days was followed by Swimming Lessons and Bitter Orange which I reviewed for LoveReading, declaring it an atmospheric, stormy beauty of a read that made me positively ache for the characters, I also remember an ending so perfect it hurt. Her latest Costa Novel Award winning Unsettled Ground evokes raw emotions and yet is thoughtfully compassionate and emotionally intelligent as well as a truly truly beautiful novel. The words danced from the pages into my mind, and pieces of my heart cracked and broke away even as hope remained within touching distance. Her novels stay with me, nudging me occasionally, the feelings still waiting to be rediscovered even months or years later. 

And so to her Guest Editor appearance, Claire’s chosen topic really calls to me, and I found myself falling in love with her suggestions, I have most definitely added more books to my to-be-read pile! 

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Claire Fuller is the author of four novels. Her most recent, Unsettled Ground, won the Costa Novel Award 2021 and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her first, Our Endless Numbered Days won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize, her second, Swimming Lessons was shortlisted for the Encore prize, and her third, Bitter Orange was on the International Dublin Literary Award longlist. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Claire also writes flash fiction and short stories. Many have been published, and she has won the BBC Opening Lines short story competition, and the Royal Academy / Pin Drop prize.

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I’m so delighted to be here as LoveReading’s autumn guest editor. I love autumn. All that tramping through the countryside, kicking at the leaves, getting muddy and finding a pub to cosy up in for a pint. Sounds good? Even better if you’ve slipped a book into your pocket before you left home. As well as being in nature I also love reading nature descriptions in novels – the next best thing to being out there in the fresh air - and I also like including the occasional non-fiction nature book in the mix to make me think. And because I like reading about nature in books, I like writing descriptions of the natural world in my own fiction, whether that’s the sea, the forest or, as in my latest, Unsettled Ground, the land. The landscape (or seascape) in novels can be used to create a sense of danger, adventure, isolation, dominance, self-realisation or any number of other emotions and experiences. Really, it’s often one big metaphor if you think about it, but it’s also just as easy (and fun) to read nature sections for how the writer uses language to conjure up a place inside my head. I’m always ready to hear a few book recommendations and I love sharing mine (look for mine on my Instagram account: @writerclairefuller) so please do join in the conversation online. In the meantime, here are five books for autumn that I’ve loved which use the natural world as a major element. 

West by Carys Davies

This wonderful novella is utterly immersive, taking the reader deep into nature. It’s about Cy Bellman, a 25-year-old widower from Pennsylvania who in 1818 leaves his ten-year-old daughter in the care of his sister in order to travel west into the American wilderness to search for the mysterious bones of a giant animal which he’s read about in the newspaper. With some trinkets and clothes, he buys the help of a Shawnee boy, with the fabulous name of, Old Woman from a Distance. What’s interesting is that it’s nature that Cy Bellman is searching for and yet though he travels through a landscape he’s never seen before he never really stops to examine it. He’s never met a Shawnee before but he doesn’t think about this. He draws pictures of small animals he doesn’t recognise and puts them in letters that he sends back to his daughter but he doesn’t marvel that these creatures are new to him. The nature in West is, as Tennyson said, red in tooth and claw; it’s Cy’s antagonist – the thing that might stop him from finding the animal bones. I’m not going to tell you whether he does find them and get back home to his daughter and sister, or not, but along the way he has to overcome snow, drought, rain, rivers and forests; each obstacle worse than the last, mostly because overcoming them takes more out of Cy each time, both physically and mentally, until even his clothes are worn thin. Who will win – Cy Bellman or nature? You’ll have to read it to find out.

Lanny by Max Porter

This short novel is intriguing and playful, with even the text shifting about on the page, as though we’re eavesdropping onto the characters’ overlapping conversations. Lanny, is about a young boy who loves nature and lives in a village not too far from London, and who goes missing. He has the regular two parents, and parents’ friends, but there is also another character: the mysterious and mythical Dead Papa Toothwort who is part of the earth and yet can shape-shift to the size of flea or into an old bath. He can slide in and out of people, and he is often angry. What he likes best of all and what makes him happy is to listen to the villagers talk, and he especially likes to listen to Lanny. Dead Papa Toothwort is a kind of modern day Greenman, symbolising rebirth, death, and the green of life. And he neatly compares with Lanny, who is very much a human, but also a kind of delightful fairy child who still sees the wonder in the natural world. A beautiful book. 

Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini translated by J Ockenden

Adelmo Farandola is a hermit living in a ramshackle cabin in the Italian Alps. In summer he roams the valleys and walks many miles to the nearest village to buy provisions. But once there, the shopkeeper tells him that he already came last week to stock up. It seems Adelmo’s memory is failing him, and clearly we have an unreliable narrator. When Adelmo returns home he meets a dog who won’t leave him alone and eventually he shares his food with the hungry animal. As winter comes Adelmo and the dog are snowed in, and when the dog begins to speak, it turns out he’s as cantankerous as the hermit. The man and the dog, although starving, make it through to spring when the snow begins to melt. And when they go outside the first thing they see is a man’s foot poking up out of the receding snow. What’s wonderful about Snow, Dog, Foot, aside from the story is the sense of place. There are lots of descriptions of the Italian Alps including the smells, noises, and of course, the snow. By the end of the book, I felt I could shut my eyes and see the place in front of me.

Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon McGregor

This novel has three sections: Lean, Fall, and Stand. In the first Doc, an old hand at Antarctic sojourns makes some very poor choices when he’s out on the ice near an Antarctic research station with two novices. It becomes clear that Doc has had a stroke. In the second section Doc’s wife, Anna, travels to Santiago in Chile to try and find a way through what’s happened to Doc who is in hospital there. In the third section Doc comes home to England and Anna has to become his carer. It’s a difficult thankless task, but eventually it is Doc who begins to find his own way through what’s happened to him. The powerful terror of the snowstorm in the first section is tremendous, as the three men out on the ice struggle to communicate – a wonderful metaphor for Doc’s aphasia in the next two sections. I found the whole novel absolutely riveting and it’s very likely to be in my top reads of the year. 

On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester

This is a memoir about family, motherhood, environmental protest and most importantly nature. It’s full of evocative sights, sounds and smells of the North Wessex Downs (coincidentally where Unsettled Ground is also set). Nicola charts the beginnings of her awareness of what was happening to the nature around her during the 1980s and the protests at Greenham Common and then later her involvement in the movements to stop the desecration of Twyford Down and the construction of the Newbury bypass. Throughout the course of the book Nicola discovers who she is, what changes she can personally bring about in the landscape, and how to raise her children to be aware of the world around them. While this is a political book, it is the truly stunning writing that brings it alive and made me feel that, alongside Nicola, I was also watching the badger cubs and the moles, seeing the red kites circle, and hearing the nightingale, and most of all, waiting with her for the cuckoo’s return.