Their savings total a few bills kept in a tin can, not enough to pay for a copy of Dot’s death certificate, much less her funeral. Jeanie has a weak heart from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever and has never worked outside of the sprawling family garden, and Julius, obliged to care for her, is a day laborer. Their mother, Dot, has died from a stroke and her body is hardly cold before her debts have started coming in, along with an eviction notice from the wealthy neighbor who owns their property. Fuller’s novel, return to the song when they play in private in their weather-beaten cottage in rural England, and its melodious despair speaks to their own predicament. Jeanie and Julius Seeder, the 51-year-old fraternal twins at the center of Ms. Its business is with sorrow, remorse and the kind of misfortune that is so abrupt and irreversible that it feels like the design of fate. Though the woman’s ghost appears during the hunter’s trial to appeal for his innocence, the song offers little consolation. The traditional Irish ballad “Polly Vaughn,” which serves as a soundtrack to Claire Fuller’s “Unsettled Ground” (Tin House, 327 pages, $26.95), tells of a hunter who mistakes his betrothed for a swan one evening and shoots her dead.
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