Our Endless Numbered Days - BookWyrm Underscore

304 pages

English language

Published March 10, 2015 by Penguin Books Ltd.

ISBN:: 978-0-241-00393-0
OCLC Number:: 905097362

(1 review)

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change. Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.

7 editions

Maxwell Volume reviewed Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

An interesting intersection between nature writing and thriller.

4 stars

Simultaneously the fairytale of a girl and her father living alone in an isolated cottage in the woods, and a tragedy of abduction and mental illness. Written primarily from the perspective of the young girl, the quality of the prose captures the developing awareness of the narrator’s situation very well. The pacing and narrative structure was a little… fluid shall we say, which I wouldn’t necessarily say is a negative thing, considering the nature of the narrator and the subject matter. A great debut, I’m looking forward to reading her subsequent novels.