I really enjoyed this book. great characters and a really interesting storyline with lots of twists and turns. Highly recommended.

Quite a tour de force for a debut, and an uncompromising tale. Brutal at times, yet also hinting that so much more could have been said, that whole swathes of story or characterisation have been left out, that each character has a shady hinterland (yes, even the nine-year-old brother).

I really enjoyed 'Our Endless Numbered Days', particularly the depiction of the central character and narrator Peggy. Aged eight for much of the story, she is an imaginative girl who copes with the suffering inflicted upon her by her father with remarkable strength of character and resourcefulness. Emotionally, Claire Fuller's writing is startling and satisfying. Her use of language always delights.

This book took a while to entrance me but when it did I had to finish it in one sitting. Safe back in London after nine years living with her survivalist father in a remote Bavarian forest Peggy looks back at what happened during those desperate years. I must have a dark and twisty mind because I did predict the ending up to a point but there were still some surprises to come. A great read and something very different.

I adored this novel. Full of twists and turns. I really enjoy novels with a but of ambiguity at the end too, which this delivered perfectly.

I read Swimming Lessons earlier in the year and then went back to catch up on Fuller’s acclaimed debut from 2015. Collectively, I am so impressed with her work, specifically the elegant way she alternates between different time periods to gradually reveal the full extent of family secrets and the potential faultiness of memory. Here the narrator is Peggy Hillcoat, a 17-year-old in recovery from nine years spent in a hut in the Bavarian forest with her father, an extreme survivalist who convinced himself – and his only daughter – that the world was ending and it was time to leave the family home in London behind and take their chances in the wilderness.

The narrative gives us brief glimpses of Peggy back home with her mother and younger brother in London in 1985, but mostly immerses us in the daily life of two people on the edge of survival. I loved how richly Fuller imagines their life: how they found food, made the most of their few possessions, and improvised little extras to make life special. In my favorite chapter of all (#12), her father builds her a makeshift piano and teaches her to read music. Of course, the piano doesn’t play a note, but in their minds it creates the most beautiful music.

Things turn darker as Peggy becomes a teenager and the fairytale perfection of their little world (her father calls her “Punzel,” short for Rapunzel) becomes tarnished. You might think of this as a less caustic My Absolute Darling or Fourth of July Creek. I would recommend Fuller’s work to any literary fiction reader looking for another author to try. To me she seems like a more accessible Iris Murdoch. Luckily for us, she’s completed her third novel, Bitter Orange, which now must undergo the editing process. I can’t wait to read it.

I thought this was an excellent book. Told retrospectively, it weaves a highly contextual story of perception and survival. It paints the very frightening picture of a parent descending into mental illness from the perspective of a child who has no outside help or context to draw from, and the way a child might cope with that situation, but it tells the tale with a voice still innocent and with an appreciation for love and beauty. Recommended.

This is not new ground in terms of a plot but this is a very well-crafted addition to the canon. Personally, I found most interesting the quarter of the book where Peggy is struggling to get by in her new urban life-that sensation of finding out what people take for granted and how little they work at understanding was well done. Yet Peggy doesn't quite seem to grow as a character so this didn't feel like a coming-of-age story that the feelings it evoked were aiming for.