Arvon asked me to create a 5-Day Writing Challenge for them and you can now sign up to receive it for free via email starting on Monday 20th July. Since it’s the National Year of Reading in the UK, I’m getting writers to use any book they might have in their house as inspiration, but to find out how, you’ll have to sign up.
By the end of the five days you should have a piece of fiction, maybe finished, or maybe the start of something longer.
Sign up here.
And in November I’ll be teaching on a Arvon course at The Hurst in Shropshire, about writing a novel and reaching the end. More information on that, here.
I’ve had a fun time chatting with lots of podcasters, journalists, and interviewers about Hunger and Thirst, all of them with a slightly different take and of course different questions. Some are audio only, there are several written interviews and one video. Take your pick!
If you’re looking for horror author interviews, you’ve come to the right place. Each week (or just about), I sit down with some of the most prominent voices in horror fiction to ask questions about their inspiration, their writing process, and much more. Episodes are released on Tuesdays on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Substack, and Youtube.
She says: “Chatting about one of my favorite reads this year, Hunger & Thirst, author Claire Fuller joins me to unpack the unreliable narrator, the modern Gothic, tapping into formative experiences, and so much more. Hunger & Thirst is a brilliant novel that sings with dread, another facet that Claire and I dig into, and I hope everyone gives this book a read. Seriously, this is the kind of novel I live for, and Claire was such a lovely conversation partner.”
A book podcast with book lover Brett Benner of bretts.book.stack on instagram and youtube. Author interviews and bookish conversations to help add more to your TBR pile!
You can listen to this or watch on Youtube. Brett is one of my favourite interviewers. This is what he says: “Brett talks with Claire Fuller about her new novel, ‘Hunger & Thirst’. They discuss writing without a plot, being drawn to dark stories, horror movies, book lists, and find out who became a character in the book.”
The interview starts: Claire Fuller never thought she would be a writer. Raised in a small Oxfordshire town, the award-winning novelist has “no real memory” of books in the house and recalls an outdoorsy childhood – living in cottages her father would do up, using outdoor loos, raising chickens, and “pigs that we killed and ate”. (“We named them as well,” she says over video call from her home in Winchester. “They were called Johannes, Sebastian, and then they disappeared one Christmas and we had pork for Christmas dinner.”)
They say: “Pod People, do we have a conversation for you! In this episode, we speak with Claire Fuller, the award-winning author of Hunger and Thirst, a novel that explores girlhood and belonging and desire and the things that haunt us. We discuss the intersection of sculpture and storytelling, cursed homesteads, the complexity of female friendships, and how disgusting and unsettling flies are, both in the book and in real life.”
The interview starts: Hunger and Thirst, a literary horror and suspense novel set in 1980s Britain, felt like it was made for me to read…I had the opportunity to interview the wonderful Claire Fuller this month. Here, we discussed art, horror, true crime, and the ways in which the three can be immensely interwoven.
Little Atoms is a weekly show about books, with authors in conversation.
This is what he says: “Claire Fuller gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn’t start writing until she was forty. She has written five previous novels including: Unsettled Ground, which in 2021 won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her latest novel Hunger and Thirst.”
The interview starts: Picture a haunted house. What do you see in your mind’s eye? Perhaps a Gothic pile, a ruined tower, some bats? Probably not a suburban bungalow in Hampshire, but that may change once you read Claire Fuller’s genuinely disturbing literary horror, Hunger & Thirst.
From KMUW Studios and part of the NPR Network, Marginalia is a weekly 29-minute show hosted by Beth Golay. Episodes always features an author interview, and sometimes include editorial commentary, book reviews, indie bookstore reading recommendations and other marginalia to enhance the reading experience.
She says: “Claire Fuller’s new book, Hunger & Thirst, is a thriller and gothic horror novel, but don’t let that scare you too much. It’s creepy, but primarily in an atmospheric sense. This is my second interview with Claire Fuller. We spoke in 2017 about her novel Swimming Lessons. Although she might be best known for her fourth novel, Unsettled Ground, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction and won in the novel category of that year’s Costa Book Award. Hunger & Thirst is her sixth novel. Here’s our conversation.”
Co-hosts Corrie and Lucia met at university. Fast forward half a lifetime, and they now talk just about everyday, recording their discussions about books every fortnight.
They say: “We had an amazing time hearing Claire compare the art of sculpting to the art of writing, why her novels end in ambiguity, how writing is really hard work, and how the only thing that ties Claire Fuller books together is that nothing ties them together.”
Claire Fuller’s latest novel is inspired by her teenage years living in a haunted bungalow in Winchester… and it’s not for the faint-hearted. When I sat down with award-winning author Claire Fuller in a cosy village pub just outside Winchester, the first thing I told her was that her new book Hunger and Thirst gave me nightmares. She seemed delighted. Given the themes of the novel, I can’t blame her.
Hunger and Thirst is the first of my six novels to feature an artist, which surprises me, since I was one myself for many years.
Ursula is a reclusive and famous sculptor in her fifties, whose first job at sixteen is working in the post room of the art school where I studied sculpture. There’s a lot about art and wood carving in this novel, and these sections were wonderful to write – almost like making the pieces without (much of) the effort! In the book, Ursula examines and is critical about a sculpture of some ribs and intestines, which was in fact the first carving I ever did.
Do you love books where the house is almost as important as the human characters? Me too.
I’ve just finished Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans and I loved the mismatched, ugly Dimperley Manor full of taxidermied animals. (I’ll be speaking to Lissa about it at Winchester Books Festival on 19th April 2026 – join us!)
And it got me thinking about other novels where the houses are full of presence, including, ahem, one of mine.
There are a few stately homes amongst this lot but not all of them are grand. You’ll also find houses full of sand, houses and land passed down through time, and one I almost forgot, the graphic novel, The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart which was published this week. (Thanks to my Librarian Husband for the finger.)
Tell me what I’ve missed! There are already others that I’ve been thinking of as I type, including North Woods, and Brideshead Revisited. But let me know which other novels you love where the house is (almost) centre stage.
Click on the pictures to be taken to Bookshop.org (UK) where you can buy most of them.
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I’ll be shortly going on a UK tour for my next novel, Hunger and Thirst. I’d love it if you could join me on one of my visits, or online – including a US online event. More details here.
I recently finished reading (listening to) The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and I loved it. It’s a novel of letters sent and received. Sybil Van Antwerp is in her 70s and has spent a lifetime writing to her best friend, her brother who lives in France, the son of a friend, several famous writers, a customer service agent and various others. We learn about her and her life in what she reveals or hides from others. She’s prickly but compassionate and gradually her own pain is exposed.
Letters in novels, are hard to do, I know because I did it a little in my second novel, Swimming Lessons, and in my fifth, The Memory of Animals. Usually the recipient of the letter knows so much about what the writer is explaining that in real life they would use a sort of shorthand, and yet the reader still needs to know what’s going on. Luckily for us Evans does it brilliantly, so brilliantly it made me cry.
So, I thought I’d do a list of six other books which contain letters and notes. Including Swimming Lessons.
Have you read any of the others, or do you have any to recommend? Let me know.
My local independent book shop, P&G Wells is offering signed and dedicated copies on pre-orders of Hunger and Thirst. Order it now via their website and just add what you’d like me to write in the book in the orders notes before you check out. Whether that’s simply your name, and my signature, or something more elaborate, I’ll pop into the shop when they have your book in and personalise it with your request. P&G Wells will then contact you let you know it’s ready to be collected, or they can put it in the post. (If you don’t live in the UK, contact them for postage costs.)
So, it’s your turn to choose the next book for book club, and you don’t don’t know what to choose. Here are five that we read in my book group and which generated really interesting discussions. They weren’t the best liked and didn’t receive the highest scores, but these were the ones where we talked the most.
Don’t you think that book groups where people disagree about the book or discover something new are the best?
Let me know the books that have had the best discussions in your book group.
And if you ever choose one of mine, drop me a line and let me know which one you’re reading and I can email you some book group questions.
In 2025 I read about the same number of books as the previous year – 85 books, mostly contemporary or a novel from an author’s backlist, and I also made a promise to my friend Lizzy to read a ‘classic’ – this year, Pride and Prejudice. A couple of my top ten books came late in the year (A Sport and a Pastime and Heart the Lover, and one, The Infamous Gilberts (which isn’t published until 2026) jumping into my top three. I always feel a little sad for those books that are bumped off my ever developing list of ten favourites. Perhaps I should do a second post about almost made-its.
Two of the books in the picture are mock-ups. We listened to the audio book and forgot to buy the physical book. Can you spot which ones?
So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share a record-breaking three this year: Take What You Need by Idra Novey, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry which we read over twelve months in our book group.
My lovely, funny, frustrating father died in last March, and I’ve been clearing his flat. One thing I brought home to put on my own wall was a family tree. There is dust along the top of the frame that has been there for years and I cannot bear to wipe it off. Angela Tomaski gets this. She writes about loss, but in such a darkly funny, brilliant way, that I have fallen in love with The Infamous Gilberts. Maximus, an enigmatic neighbour, takes us on a tour of Thornwalk, a dilapidated stately home, just before its contents are removed and it’s made into a hotel. Object by object he introduces us to the Gilbert siblings, Lydia, Hugo, Anabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind, and their morbidly amusing tragedies. It is an unusual narrative style, one I’ve never read before, but it is so worth sticking with. The chapter headings give a hint and flavour of the book: ‘A Small Pile of Mouldy Hay,’ ‘Some Very Small Socks’, and ‘The Greasy Window’. I was swept into the siblings’ lives, even while most of them are pretty awful human beings. I laughed, and sniggered and underlined and yes, I cried at the end. Although it might have been dust in my eye. Buy The Infamous Gilberts from Bookshop.org
Leaving by Roxana Robinson
Leaving by Roxana Robinson was one of three books recommended by author Huma Qureshi as part of my Books under the Radar series on my website and Instagram. I couldn’t possibly read all the books suggested in the series each week but this one caught my eye and I bought it and read it as soon as it arrived, and it completely absorbed me. It reminded me of the very best Sue Miller in that it is at the heart a family drama but with a lot to say about loyalty, love, and parental relationships with adult children. Sarah and Warren meet each other again at sixty by chance. They were girlfriend and boyfriend when they were twenty or so, but split up and lost touch. Now they reconnect and start a relationship even though Warren is married. He decides to leave his wife for Sarah but this act has consequences far beyond anyone can imagine. The ending hit me really hard (don’t go into this book thinking it will be a light family drama) especially since almost this same scenario recently happened to someone close to me. Highly recommended, and very likely to be on my top reads of the year. Buy Leaving from Bookshop.org
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Take What You Need by Idra Novey was recommended to me by fellow author and friend, Judith Heneghan, and I loved it. In rural Pennsylvania, sculptor, Jean is mourning the estrangement of her step daughter, Leah, and remembering how four years ago their relationship broke apart. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties welding metal alone in the sitting room of her father’s old house, when a family move into the almost derelict house next door, where the water has been cut off. Jean starts a friendship with the young man of the family who helps her with her work. In alternate chapters we hear from Leah who is returning, to Jean’s house having learnt of her death – and is examining the prejudices she encounters and finally, her own. Goodness, this is so good. Propulsive and with brilliant writing. It looks at the sexuality of older women, American poverty, sculpting, bias and expectations, motherhood – there is so much to think about, but without the story feeling overloaded. Highly recommended. Buy Take What You Need from Bookshop.org
And Claire’s next 7
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
This is Salter’s third novel, written / set in the early – mid 1960s in rural France, and it is AMAZING. For its prose – descriptions of France and travelling by train and food and buildings. For its atmosphere – out of season France, a slow, languid feeling where nothing really happens. And for its characters and very graphic descriptions of sex. An unnamed and unreliable American narrator goes to stay in his friends’ house in Autun, a small town in Burgundy. While he is there, summoning up courage to speak to a local woman, another American man – Philip Dean arrives in a Delage convertible, and decides to stay. Dean meets a local shopgirl, Anne-Marie and they start a relationship. From here on, the unnamed narrator imagines the time Dean and Anne-Marie spend together: their trips out for meals in the car, their overnight stays in hotels, their visits to her parents, and the sex they have. Soon Dean runs out of money, and although naive Anne-Marie is expecting marriage, something else happens that Salter cleverly foreshadows if you pay attention. Buy A Sport and a Pastime from Bookshop.org
Castaway by Lucy Irvine
Who remembers this from the first time around? First published in 1983 it’s about the year that Lucy Irvine spent on an uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, with Gerald Kingsland who is twenty-five years older than her (she is 25). I think I read it in the 1980s (I took this copy from my dad’s shelves recently), and on this re-read I loved it. On the island Lucy wants to be busy fishing, making a shelter, exploring, but Gerald either wants to lie in the shade or persuade Lucy to have sex. As they nearly starve and run out of water, instead of Gerald, Lucy falls in love with Tuin, the island. And her writing, about the sun, the interior and the sea, is incredibly sensual. She is also, it feels, very frank with her own frustrations, desires, and needs – and in fact some details that made me squint as I read – and the book opens up all sorts of interesting questions about couples, compromise, affection, and sexual needs. In the end, the couple are ‘saved’ by local islanders who bring their engines to Gerald to repair in return for food and water. Even this adds a complication, because it means Lucy can stay on the island but at what price? It’s fascinating stuff and I’m still mulling it over. Buy Castaway from Bookshop.org
The Adversary by Michael Crummey
This is the fourth Michael Crummey novel I’ve read, and like all the others I loved it. In the late 18th Century two siblings – the Widow Caines and Abe Strapp are fighting for commercial supremacy in Mockbeggar, a small town on the shore of Newfoundland. Abe is an awful man – a drunkard, a thief, a murderer, and you can only hope that the Widow Caines is better. She seems to treat her servants and the villagers better, but she has her own devastating schemes that are only shockingly revealed at the very end of the novel. There is weather and plague, and curses, and brilliant characters. In a weird way it reminded me of Lonesome Dove – in the way the POV shifts, in the language that they use, in how they both feel like a brilliant saga that you never want to end. Highly recommended. Buy The Adversary from Bookshop.org
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
Five big stars for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I chose this book for the book club I run at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. It was pretty divisive, with lots of people actively disliking it but I adored it. An unnamed narrator is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Manhattan when a close friend of hers – someone she had a brief affair with and is also a writer and teacher – kills himself. The narrator is persuaded by the man’s widow to look after his Great Dane, Apollo even though her apartment doesn’t allow pets. This rather slight story is interspersed with musings about creative writing teaching, loss, suicide, friendship and much more. And it made a brilliant book club book even though many people hated it. There was so much to discuss and some of the things other members pointed out were brilliantly revealing. Buy The Friend from Bookshop.org
You Like it Darker by Stephen King
Twelve creepy, weird and brilliant short stories. I had my favourites and they tended to be the longer ones: Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (Danny dreams that he discovers a person, murdered and buried behind a gas station, when he visits he discovers his dream is true); Rattlesnakes (a man befriends his neighbour – a slightly mad but harmless woman who pushes a stroller around with, supposedly her dead twins in it); and Slide Inn Road (a family take a wrong turn in their car and are apprehended by two men who terrorise them). Plenty here to get your teeth into and keep you up at night. Buy You Like it Darker from Bookshop.org
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
An epic – in storytelling, in length and in writing ability. 843 gripping pages. I don’t really understand how McMurtry did it, kept all the storylines interesting, all the characters completely real, kept surprising me with who he killed off. And how he wrote the women who have so often been left out of, or relegated to inconsequential characters in Westerns. In the late 1870s, Gus and Call, the owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company decide to make a cattle drive north from their Texas home of Lonesome Dove to Montana, where they hear the grass is greener and there is plenty of land. They take with them an assorted bunch of cowboys – some teenagers, some experienced hands, some troublemakers – as well as a local prostitute, a cook and a couple of pigs. Some men are lost, others are hanged, there are fights along the way with Indians, and the reuniting of a long lost love. I fell so hard for this book, and if I’m being truthful, Gus. Oh Gus. Sob, Sigh. I read it split into about 10 chunks with my book club. It was universally loved. Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org
Heart the Lover by Lily King
“A long tender farewell to youth”, as one character says in this intense, emotional, lovely book. The narrator (only named at the very end) has her first relationship at college, unsurprisingly there are issues, but through this man she starts a love affair with Yash, someone who will move in and out of her life with desire, and love, and pain. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but there are mostly two parts: youth in college, and middle-age. I cried. You will cry too. Buy Heart the Lover from Bookshop.org
Tim’s Top Reads of 2025
Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
What an epic! – I’ve never read a Western before but this is something else. Enthralling characters, blistering dialogue and storylines that are both brutal and tender. It’s very long, but when I got to page 843 I wanted to start all over again. I travelled every mile from Texas to Montana with the Hat Creek Cattle company. Everyone I’ve met who has also read it has felt the same way. Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org
Back in the World by Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff’s short stories are amazing. I seem to have read some every year for the past 5 years, and keep coming back to them. Favourite one in this book is ‘Coming Attractions’ where a precocious teenage girl working late in a movie theatre makes prank calls to strangers, including a man named Mr. Love. She thinks she’s smart but in reality she’s lonely and abandoned. Top marks.
Flesh by David Szalay
Szalay has written a cracking, and Booker Prize winning worthy, tale of a man’s life – from Hungary to England, from poverty to money and from brutality to peace. It’s such great writing – where you find yourself rooting for István even though he can be a git. Every bit as good as ‘All that Man Is’ by the same author. Thoroughly recommended and surprisingly fun. Buy Flesh from Bookshop.org
That’s it from us in 2025. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2025.
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My novel, Hunger and Thirst will be published in May in the UK, and June in the US and Canada. Buy it from Bookshop.org in the UK. In the US, if you pre-order on 30th or 31st December 2025 from Barnes and Noble you can get 25% off if you are a Premium or Rewards member (free to join). Just type PREORDER25 at the checkout.
Every year my librarian husband and I each decide on our top ten reads of the year. This year’s list (2025) will take us into our eleventh year, so before we announce them I thought I’d look back on my 30 favourites from the past ten years. I usually read 80 – 100 books a year, both fiction and non-fiction, and from my top ten each year I pick my top three, apart from 2016 when apparently I found it too difficult, so I have retrospectively picked three from that group.
Famous and less well-known
Some of these books you’ll no doubt have heard of: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Lessons by Ian McEwan, but others are likely to be less well known but still deserve your attention: Halibut on the Moon by David Vann, The Hare by Melanie Finn, and Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter.
Fiction and Non-fiction and the rest of the stats
There are four non-fiction books in my list: Dadland, After the Eclipse, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Maurice and Maralyn. There are 16 female authors and 14 male. The oldest was published in 1947: A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor. One author appears twice: Ian McEwan. There are 14 American authors, 9 British, 2 Canadian, 1 South African, 1 Italian, 1 German, and 1 New Zealand. There two books in translation. And I love them all.
The full list
Click on the year to be taken through to the page where I reviewed the books, to find out why it made my top three that year and what each is about:
This is an edited article that first appeared on my website in 2019.
Archaeology
The titles of my books have always tended to evolve, and my third novel, Bitter Orange was no exception. Usually though, the early Word files are simply called, Book 1 or Book 4, or whichever it is. But this novel had a title from the beginning: Archaeology. I thought it was going to be about people digging things up, literally and metaphorically.
I keep a writing diary and on 22nd April 2016 (the novel was started on 23rd December 2015), I thought that Archaeology was too difficult a word to write. ‘Those three bloody vowels in a row are beginning to annoy me,’ I wrote. And on 30th August of that year, I added, ‘I’m thinking of changing the title to Blood Orange’.
Blood Orange
For the rest of the time I was writing it, the novel was called Blood Orange, and this was what it was called when I sent it to my literary agent, and when it was submitted to my publishers in the UK, the US, and Canada. And they bought it with that name. Blood Orange.
The story is about Frances, a woman who is commissioned to survey the follies in the gardens of an English country house in 1969. There she meets and becomes besotted by Cara and Peter and visits the orangery alongside the house which has (or had at the time of writing) a single blood orange tree, so enormous it has broken through the glass panes. Blood oranges are sweet, and the fruit are ripe at a certain time of year. Three blood oranges are picked from the tree and squeezed to make juice – a point integral to the plot.
Then, in July 2017, after the book was sold, my editor at Penguin told me that the sale of another book, a debut thriller by Harriet Tyce had just been announced in The Bookseller (the UK trade magazine for publishing), and it was also called Blood Orange.
Titles of books, or albums or anything else aren’t copyrighted, but it was quickly agreed that publishing books with the same title around the same time was not a good idea, and Harriet’s had been announced, and mine hadn’t. It was mine that would have to change.
Bitter Orange
Changing a title I’d been happy with for months if not years was a difficult thing to accept. I was angry – at no one in particular – for quite a while.
I had lots of conversations with my editors and agents and lots of suggestions were bounced back and forth. I went through the novel with a highlighter and I wrote lists of word combinations. It was Sarah Lutyens, one of the founders of my literary agents, Lutyens and Rubinstein who came up with Bitter Orange. I think she just emailed it to me one day – two words that sounded perfect together.
Except, that a bitter orange (which is not eaten or juiced, but generally used to make marmalade), is a very different thing to a blood orange. I wrote to Patricia Oliver from Global Orange Groves who had been helping me with orange tree advice for the book. Bitter oranges fruit at different times to blood oranges, and the juice is barely drinkable. Anyone who writes will know that you make what might seem like a simple change in the text: blood to bitter, but the repercussions ripple on and on. If I needed my characters to try to drink the juice, someone needed to realise they needed sugar, then they had to get sugar, which meant someone had to go shopping, which meant someone had to leave the house when I needed them to remain there. I faced lots of niggly revising.
Bitter Orange is better
But once I’d sorted out the changes and had lived with the new title for a while, it seemed more suited than Blood Orange, which I think sounds very thriller-like, and Bitter Orange isn’t a thriller.
By the time the book was published in the UK, in the US, and Canada, I loved the title: Bitter Orange.
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What do you think about the title? Let me know
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Bitter Orange has been published in Germany, US, Canada, Greece, France, Spain, and Russia, and Turkey. It is available as a audio book and has recently been optioned for film.
orange tree, so enormous it has broken through the glass panes. Blood oranges are sweet, and the fruit are ripe at a certain time of year. Three blood oranges are picked from the tree and squeezed to make juice – a point integral to the plot.
me one day – two words that sounded perfect together.