Full of jeopardy and strangeness, but also laced with Fuller’s trademark generosity and compassion, a startling and satisfying book. Working with Claire Fuller is one of the great joys of my career. With each book, I learn something new, visit, a unique world, meet unforgettable characters, and I am always left, wanting to share Claire‘s work with everyone I know. The Memory of Animals, our fifth book together, is no exception. Claire has delivered a tight and steering novel set in the near future about a woman who— motivated by secrets and mistakes and her past— joins and experimental drug trial that might be humanity’s last hope to cure a new devastating disease. When I first encounter the story, I shared with Claire, but it was like anything I had ever read.— but if pressed, it would require a mashup: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark meets The Breakfast Club meets My Octopus Teacher”.

For anyone who misses the analogy, Fuller spends the rest of the book ramming it home in a series of letters Neffy writes to – wait for it – an octopus, which she looked after in her past life as a marine biologist. Yes, you heard me correctly: ­epistles to a cephalopod. What the point of these missives is, though – other than an opportunity for some pretty purple prose and an excuse to bombard the reader with facts that read like they’ve been cribbed from Wikipedia – I’m not really sure. It looks suspiciously like padding. The memory device was an oddly placed piece of the story. I think the story would have been stronger for me if we just had reflections and memories from Neffy as she was going through this hard experience rather than this "memory device." As London descends into chaos outside the hospital windows, Neffy befriends Leon, who before the pandemic had been working on a controversial technology that allows users to revisit their memories. She withdraws into projections of her past—a childhood bisected by divorce, a recent love affair, her obsessive research with octopuses, and the one mistake that ended her career. The lines between past, present, and future begin to blur, and Neffy is left with defining questions: Who can she trust? Why can't she forgive herself? How should she live, if she survives?While she weighs up her choices, she is introduced to a pioneering and controversial technology which allows her to revisit memories from her life before: a childhood divided between her enigmatic mother and her father in his small hotel in Greece. Intoxicated by the freedom of the past and the chance to reunite with those she loves, she increasingly turns away from her perilous present. But in this new world where survival rests on the bonds between strangers, is she jeopardising any chance of a future? From the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, and Unsettled Ground comes a beautiful and searing novel of memory, love, survival—and octopuses. From the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, and Unsettled Ground comes a beautiful and searing novel of memory, love, survival―and octopuses. Claire Fuller is a fascinating writer, and The Memory of Animals is further evidence of her powers. Her story is one of survival, but her subject is humanity itself. With immense skill, she shines a light on the dark heart of our existence—the beauty and brutality of human behavior. An unforgettable novel.

TMOA was a character study kind of book of humans during a crisis! These 5 volunteers are left over after the pandemic takes over and everyone from the hospital has left. One of the volunteers, and our leading lady, Neffy is the only one from the group that had the vaccine and survived. It was such a wild ride because one of the characters, Leon, has a memory tool device that let's people "revisit" memories from their past and it feels very real life. He tried it on everyone else but it didn't work until he tried it on Neffy. There are past and present moments from what's happening in the hospital with the volunteers and Neffy's memories from this "device thing." This is another very different novel, it’s imaginative but is inevitably dark and bleak as we are still in our own pandemic so it may not be for everyone. However, it is well worth reading in my opinion as Claire Fuller is such a talented writer. This one is part pandemic, part sci-fi, part dystopian thriller...everything gets jumbled along together, edging around all of those genres really, and it caught my attention immediately and held it all the way through. Much here is familiar ground for Fuller; the set-ups are different, but each of her novels charts the intimate interpersonal relationships between a small group cut off from the wider world in one way or another. Our Endless Numbered Days features a forest-dwelling ­survivalist father and daughter prepping for the end of the world, while Swimming Lessons presents us with a family grieving the loss of a woman missing, presumed drowned. Then there’s the trio who inhabit the grand old crumbling mansion in Bitter Orange, all up in each other’s business in unhealthy ways. And most recently, the middle-aged twins who live in rural isolation in Unsettled Ground.

And what is this “revisiting” technology that Leon has created and how does it play into the story? Light spoiler in this paragraph* I don’t typically enjoy sci-fi elements in books, I thought Fuller’s use a ‘revisiting’ machine to connect Neffy to the past was clever. It worked to both increase our understanding of Neffy and makes us think about technology, memory, nostalgia and perspective. Neffy, a 27-year-old marine biologist volunteers for a vaccine trial. Following a bad reaction, she finds herself alone with four strangers in the midst of a pandemic. Plus, octopuses! Of the 16 volunteers at the double-blind vaccine trial, each isolated in separate rooms, Neffy turns out to be one of those selected for a dose of the virus, and spends a week close to death. When she emerges it is into a world that has been completely transformed. There are no staff left at Vaccine BioPharm and only four of the other volunteers remain: Leon, Yahiko, Rachel and Piper. The streets of London are empty except for bodies, crashed cars and a few extremely ill survivors; all television channels are unstaffed or off air. So far, so 28 Days Later – with the unsettling new resonance that comes from the fact that we have all just had a close brush with the outcome Fuller describes.

In the third narrative strand, Neffy writes a series of letters to “My Dear H” while in quarantine. These tell the story of her career as a marine biologist, and as she describes the lifelong connection she has felt to octopuses, it becomes clear how often she was uncomfortable performing experiments on them or even keeping them (bored and depressed) in captivity. These bits not only point out the irony of her own confinement (and the irony of her having access to a memory machine during a pandemic that erases memory), but will eventually answer the question of where her debt came from.Compelling. . . . Riveting. . . . long-time Fuller readers will relish this completely engrossing story, which questions what we value most. Fuller excels in examining the everyday moments at the heart of a life. . . . A memorable meditation on how the human struggle to survive in captivity is not so different than that of our animal kin. Between wanting to do the right thing and the vortex of mistakes from the past there is a real place, one woven from danger and desire. Claire Fuller’s riveting novel, The Memory of Animals, creates a world within a world where a young woman marine biologist faces off with a global pandemic and the hopes for a vaccine by diving into her own past. She might retrieve some fragment that could secure self-preservation as well as—if not humanity, then at least the human heart.

Plotwise there is double intrigue: the direness of the situation beyond the hospital walls, and an earlier mystery, involving Neffy and her father, that is revealed subtly and sensitively as the story unfolds. The superb ending ties everything together with a moving, tragic cohesiveness. The bleak twists and sudden shifts forward in time feel earned and in keeping with the world Fuller has created. As her caged animals make a bid for freedom, the reader will applaud their attempts to keep going against the likelihood of their endless numbered days. Sarah Gilmartin A haunting novel about love, survival and everything in between ... one to get excited about' Stylist, Best Modern Dystopia

Media Reviews

From the Costa-Winning, Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground: a gripping, haunting novel about human need and survival, for readers of Never Let me Goand Station Eleven Set in a post pandemic/ apocalyptic world, we meet Neffy as she enters a research facility for a pandemic vaccine. We then follow her time in the facility as the world falls apart outside. Through experimental technology Neffy is able to revisit old memories and this gives us insight into the events which led her to take part in the vaccine trial. We also hear a little more of her earlier life through letters she writes to an octopus. plus…. the wonderful inserts about octopuses, ocean creatures that are most famous for having eight arms and bulbous heads. I am not sure what I feel. There is so much to take in that it probably is best if I just begin with the premise and try and sort out my feelings from there.