Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, Sixteen-year-old Ursula Major finds herself with a new job in the post room of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and-delightfully- some new friends, including wild-child, Sue, a horror film enthusiast. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family. Ursula shares the squat with Sue’s boyfriend Vince, but it is the two girls, together with Sue’s brother Raymond, who hold a séance there. Ursula reflects, “When I was watching horror films, I liked the feeling of being scared while knowing I was safe; that I could move my eyes away from the screen and be in the real world. I didn’t know whether this, in the Underwood’s kitchen, was real or pretend.” As a sculptor, her most famous work and the one that provides her with a life-changing amount of money, is a woman carve from stone, an “adult foetus” nestling in a carved bear, “a massive supine grizzly.” Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry – for food- and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It’s a decision that will haunt her for decades. Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London with her identity is expose by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker 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. Fuller is merely trying to point out that Ursula feels monstrous or feral, as a child she tried to eat a bar of soap. Finding that it tasted like “bitter fat”, instead she caught a fly to eat. Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without- and if they will finally make her pay for her past mistakes.

Hunger &Thirst by Clare Fuller, Fig Tree £18.99/ Tin House $28, 320pages.