Our Endless Numbered Days (novel)

Our Endless Numbered Days is the debut novel by British author Claire Fuller, which won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize.^[1]

Plot

Our Endless Numbered Days is the story of Peggy Hillcoat, who when she is eight in 1976, spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother’s grand piano.

After a family crisis which Peggy doesn’t fully understand until later, her survivalist father James, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. And so 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.

Peggy isn’t seen again for another nine years.

Our Endless Numbered Days, is published in the UK by Fig Tree / Penguin, in Canada by House of Anansi, in France by Editions Stock, in Israel by Keter Books, in the US by Tin House, in Turkey by Kafka Kitap, in Italy by Mondadori, in Taiwan, and The Netherlands, and will be published in Germany, Brazil, Denmark and the Czech Republic in 2017.

It won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction and was nominated for the 2015 Edinburgh First Book Award, was longlisted for the 2016 Waverton Good Read Award and was a finalist in the ABA (American Booksellers Association) 2016 Indies Best Books Award. It was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick for Spring 2016, and a Waterstones Book Club book. In 2015 it was selected by Powells as an indiespensible book.

References