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From the celebrated author of Bitter Orange and Swimming Lessons comes an "atmospheric, psychologically vivid, and unputdownable" new novel of complicated friendship and the desperate need to belong (Alice Winn).
1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job delivering mail at a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and some new friends, including wild-child Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at the Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can't resist this hodgepodge family. But as Sue's behavior and demands become more extreme, Ursula, who has always been hungry—for food, but more importantly for love and acceptance—carries out her friend's terrible dare. And, for this, Ursula finds herself literally haunted.
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned but reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by a true-crime documentarian researching an unsolved disappearance. But the filmmaker is not the only one who has discovered Ursula's whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without—and if they will finally make her pay for her past mistakes.
Part gothic horror, part coming-of-age, and a with contemporary twist on the haunted-house story, Hunger and Thirst is a chilling tale of loneliness, of the dangerous line between wanting and needing, and of how far a person will go to truly belong.
"Psychologically gripping, disquieting, and breathlessly suspenseful ... Fuller performs a feat few writers manage... . A brilliant and truly terrifying account of trauma." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This slow-burn literary novel masterfully depicts Ursula's trauma, building a chilling psychological unease. Visceral and creepy, the genre-bending tale weaves body horror and haunted-house elements into a morally ambiguous tale that blurs the lines between guilt, possession, and reality." —Booklist (starred review)
"In Claire Fuller's haunting thriller Hunger and Thirst, a teenager's isolation in a decrepit, abandoned house coincides with a grisly murder... . Masterful and macabre ... The heightened drama and tension carry through to the book's gratifying ending." —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"Fuller has a knack for sustaining a spooky vibe, and she cannily makes her protagonist savvy about the horror tropes evoked in the novel ("Why does a character in a horror film go to investigate the unidentified noise?" Ursula narrates). This satisfies." —Publishers Weekly
"A dare that Ursula took in adolescence is literally haunting her years later." —Library Journal
"Harrowing and tender in turn, Hunger and Thirst is an expertly sculpted character study of a girl living in the long shadow of trauma—it gripped me immediately and didn't let go. Ursula's desperate hungers live in all of us, and Claire Fuller illuminates them in exquisite, exacting prose. This is the kind of book to clear a weekend for, the kind of resonant nightmare that lingers long after its end." —Hayden Casey, author of A Harvest of Furies
"Claire Fuller has set a dauntingly high bar with her previous novels, and Hunger and Thirst does not disappoint. A gothic chiller—haunting, artful, suspenseful, complex, and cinematic, with traces of early Ian McEwan." —William Landay, author of All That Is Mine I Carry With Me
This information about Hunger and Thirst was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
For first degree, Claire Fuller studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She began writing fiction at the age of 40, after many years working as a co-director of a marketing agency, she received a Masters degree (distinction) in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Winchester.
Claire is the author of Unsettled Ground (2021), winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Bitter Orange (2018), Swimming Lessons (2017), which was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for second novels, and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) which won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. She live near Winchester, England with her husband and a cat called Alan, and has two grown-up children.
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