Luridly hot summers occupy a particular place in fiction; an interzone where the normal rules are suspended and unruly emotions – lust, envy, guilt – boil their way to the surface. Class structures momentarily crumble and social norms are thrown out of the wide-open window, all made possible by the unspoken contract that the hot spell cannot last for ever. Claire Fuller’s third novel follows in this tradition, exemplified by novels such as The Go-Between, Brideshead Revisited and Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, setting its crucial action in a simmering, dilapidated country house in 1969, a period now recalled by its narrator, Frances Jellico.
Wasted by illness and old age, Frances lies in an “end-of-life” bed in an unspecified institution, visited only by a mysterious vicar who seems hellbent on extracting some manner of confession from her. But what might this eloquent, thoughtful, self-deprecating woman have possibly done?
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