our endless numbered days by claire fuller

This much we know at the start: it is 1976 and Peggy’s father is building a fall-out shelter for the seemingly inevitable armageddon. Peggy, a young girl, is stolen away by her survivalist father to “die Hütte”, a ramshackle cottage in a European forest, and tells her that the end of the world has come, that her mother has died and they are the only survivors. Our Endless Numbered Days is inspired by fairytales the story’s menace is more Hansel and Gretel than that of a parent’s real-life horror story. This is the premise for Claire Fuller’s debut novel, and it’s a triumph. There is another side to the story: that of the point of view of the missing person. The American detective novelist Laura Lippmann has described such missing-person novels as real-life ghost stories where those left behind are haunted by the possibilities of what has happened to their loved one. The stakes are high with a subject like this.

The year is young and yet already the literary world has been confronted with several novels that force readers to experience a parent’s bleakest nightmare, the abduction of a child – in both cases, that of a girl. Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller Fig Tree (The slightly odd sub-editing is caused I think by someone cutting down the online version for the printed newspaper.)

The Times is pay-walled, so there’s not much point in having a link to the piece, so here is the print version. Today, The Times published a very lovely review of Our Endless Numbered Days – my first review in a UK national paper.

Our endless numbered days by claire fuller