Hunger and Thirst

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).

"A dare that Ursula took in adolescence is literally haunting her years later." --Library Journal, Big Books of the Year

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.

Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction; and The Memory of Animals. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.