Claire Fuller carefully sculpts her sixth novel, “Hunger & Thirst,” into a half-sung haunt, a calliope of ghost songs: never fully grasped and impossible to forget. Threaded through each page is a panging hunger — for food, yes, but belonging more so. It asks, with growing cruelty, how far someone might go to be accepted and how much they’re willing to give up to remain there.
The novel follows Ursula, a 16-year-old who has spent years drifting through the foster care system of 1987 pre-children’s rights England, after a senseless childhood trauma leaves her orphaned. One day, her social worker finds her a job delivering mail at a local art school, which draws her into a strange, tightly wound group of coworkers led by the young, magnetic and volatile Sue. For Ursula, who has spent her life on the outside, the promise of a group she belongs to — no matter how strange — is irresistible.
Ursula and Sue’s relationship grows increasingly complicated as Ursula yearns for Sue’s family, and Sue yearns to escape it. A single, terrible act sets the central mystery in motion, and it haunts Ursula from that point forward. Whether that haunting is psychological, supernatural or an undetermined mix of the two is a question the novel refuses to resolve.
Decades later, Ursula lives under a pseudonym as a reclusive and successful sculptor in London. Her carefully constructed anonymity crumbles when a true crime filmmaker investigates a long-unsolved disappearance. The narrative shifts between timelines, only to reveal it was never about solving the mystery; instead, it circles the same festering wounds of Ursula’s regret-laden past.
Fuller’s greatest strength here is her command of atmosphere. The horror in “Hunger & Thirst” is genuinely effective, accumulating throughout the book and leaving goosebumps racing across your skin. Scenes start and immediately fall into a terrifying pattern — the same haunt inevitably coming back for Ursula, allowing dread to build until it becomes unbearable. It is easy to visualize the novel’s most disturbing moments; they play out with a cinematic clarity that lingers long after the page is turned.
The prose itself is deceptively simple, propelling the reader forward while keeping them inside Ursula’s perspective. This closeness is crucial, because the novel thrives on uncertainty. Ursula is an unreliable narrator, and the text offers no stable ground from which to interpret the events she is witnessing. Is she truly being haunted? Is she reliving her trauma so intensely that it manifests externally? Fuller resists easy answers, and the ambiguity becomes one of the novel’s most compelling qualities.
At its best, “Hunger & Thirst” is gripping, even breathtaking. But its structure occasionally works against it. The first half of the novel introduces mysteries at a rapid pace, only to resolve many of them within a few short chapters. Key questions about Ursula’s past, her greatest fears and heaviest guilt are revealed sooner than expected, leaving the latter half of the book with less narrative propulsion.
Instead, the story becomes increasingly centered on a single, unresolved mystery, revisited repeatedly, yet always from the same angle: What’s happened to Sue? While this repetition reinforces the novel’s thematic focus on the struggle to let go of trauma, it can also begin to feel narratively thin. What initially feels haunting can, over time, begin to feel overextended.
And yet, the lack of resolution is also part of the novel’s power. Fuller denies the reader a clean ending. Without a definitive explanation or clear line between reality and psychosis, there is never a true sense of closure. The haunting persists for the reader as much as it does for Ursula.
One of the more intriguing threads running through the book is its engagement with the ethics of true crime. The filmmaker’s investigation into Ursula’s past highlights the way real lives are reshaped and disrupted by the act of retelling. The novel critiques the genre’s tendency to turn traumas into nail-biting narratives, asking who benefits from these stories and who is left to live with the consequences.
The artistic influences within the novel are equally notable. Sculpture and film are not just background details but are central to the way the story is told. Fuller, who studied sculpture, brings a tactile awareness to Ursula’s passion, while the novel’s pacing, visual clarity and frequent references suggests the author’s deep infatuation with classic horror cinema. These elements give the book a textured, near-physical quality, as if the story itself has been shaped and carved by Fuller’s influences.
However, not all of the novel’s character work is equally successful. Sue, in particular, can feel frustratingly underdeveloped despite being the centerpiece of the novel. Her outspoken, often abrasive brand of feminism — which includes insulting women’s bodies and berating housewives — reads as contradictory without always being fully explored. While this may be intentionally positioning Sue as a figure who is misunderstood or internally consistent, the clarity around her motivations can make her feel more shallow than complex.
Despite its occasional uneven pacing and character shortcomings, “Hunger & Thirst” remains a compelling and deeply unsettling read. It is less interested in solving its mysteries than inhabiting them: exploring what it means to live with unanswered questions, unresolved guilt and a past that refuses to stay buried. Like the haunting at its center, “Hunger & Thirst” offers no neat closure, but instead asks how to live in the wake.
Daily Arts Summer Senior Editor Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
