Desmond Elliott prize goes to Claire Fuller's 'shocking' debut

Our Endless Numbered Days, the story of a survivalist father who hides daughter from the world, takes £10,000 award for first novels

Claire Fuller’s “shocking and beautiful” novel Our Endless Numbered Days, about a young girl whose survivalist father convinces her that the rest of the world has vanished, has won this year’s Desmond Elliott prize for debut fiction.

Fuller, 48, only began writing fiction in her 40s, encouraged by the online writing challenge NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Her winning book looks back to the mid-70s, when eight-year-old Peggy’s father is convinced that nuclear war is coming. He takes Peggy to a remote hut deep in the German forest, telling her they are the last people left on earth – and there they stay for nine years. The Guardian review said the novel brought to mind “such unlikely bedfellows as Thoreau’s Walden and Emma Donoghue’s Room”, gaining its power from “the tension it builds between the fantasy of a return to nature and the psychological damage wrought by someone who decides to turn that fantasy into reality”.

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