Claire Fuller’s Costa award-winning novel was a highly enjoyable companion on my summer road trip around parts of the UK. I enjoyed her earlier novel, Swimming Lessons, a few years ago but I think Unsettled Ground is an even stronger book.

This is a novel that tackles the issue of how society treats people who live on the margins of “conventional life.” The theme is explored through the story of fifty-one-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius. They live with their mother Dot in a run down cottage in rural Wiltshire, growing their own food and making music.

They had no reason to doubt her when she said Jeanie had a weak heart. Nor did they doubt her when Dot said they lived rent-free in the cottage — an agreement made after their father’s fatal accident with the landlord’s tractor. Dot’s sudden death calls into question everything the twins thought they knew to be true.

The twins are not well equipped to handle the realities of life after Dot’s death. Their mother had taken care of all the practicalities like managing their household budget, paying the bills. Now it’s down to the twins to fend for themselves.

All Jeanie knows is how to cook, clean and tend to the vegetable garden. She never finished school and barely learned to read and write. Julius has never had more than badly-paid labouring jobs and shifts as a farm worker, the kind of jobs he can reach by bicycle. Traumatised by finding his father’s decapitated body, the man is physically sick every time he gets in a car.

The idea of doing work other than looking after her own house and garden makes her feel like something inside her, as tiny as an onion seed, is splitting open, ready to send out its shoot.

Unsettled Ground reveals how the twins face not just practical challenges, but moral judgment from a society that equates their lifestyle with failure. Their self-sufficient lifestyle is seen by the outside world through the lens of poverty rather than choice.

Neither of them understand how to engage with officialdom. It’s not their fault — the systems supposedly in place to help people who have no money, no job and no home, are simply not designed for people like Jeanie and Julian.

If you can’t read, how can you understand the forms to register your mother’s death let alone organise her burial? If you can’t drive, there’s no bus service and can’t afford a taxi how do you get to the nearest hospital to visit a seriously injured brother many miles away? If you don’t have a bank account what are you supposed to do when someone gives you cheques to pay for your casual work?

The twins fall between the cracks every time, because they don’t know the services exist or how to access them. So they end up in a home without heating and lighting and eventually in a mouldy caravan hidden in woodland. Their lack of knowledge about the way the world works, also makes them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Some neighbours do try to help, like Dot’s long-term friend Bridget, who offers Jeanie use of her spare room. But it’s help that comes tainted with her own preconceived ideas about how the twins ‘should’ and ‘ought’ rather than how they ‘want’ to live their lives.

Unsettled Ground uses the fundamental disconnect between Bridget’s views and lifestyle and those of the twins, to highlight the negative attitudes often prevalent in mainstream society towards ‘alternative’ ways of living. What outsiders see as subsistence living and “odd” represents comfort and security for Jeanie and Julius and forcing them to move out of that realm and ‘conform’ is terrifying.

The theme alone makes it a terrific novel but I also thought Claire Fuller created a wonderful sense of the claustrophobic relationship between Jeanie and Julius.

He sees the loss of their cottage as a chance to finally break free and embark on a new life, maybe with the very accommodating woman living above the chip shop. Jeanie however doesn’t want change — she just wants her old way of life to continue. She hates the idea that Julius could leave her, yet is running out of patience with his drinking and carousing. This aspect of the novel put me in mind of the twins in On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin, yearning to live separate lives yet knowing they can never be parted.