Thank you to Tin House and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own. But don’t you think we can learn from the past? See things differently, or let it help us decide what we do in the future?” Neffy is a young woman trying to cope with the recent death of her father and also the loss of her career at an aquarium due to her actions, which has left her seriously in debt. So, when the opportunity comes to earn a substantial sum of money by volunteering to participate in a vaccine trial, she leaps at the chance to do so, despite opposition from her family. She arrives at the private facility in London just as a new and deadlier strain of the virus is reaching pandemic levels - and soon the streets of London go quiet outside the facility where she is undertaking the trial. Having recovered from the virus she has been injected with, Neffy and four other surviving volunteers - Piper, Rachel, Leon and Yahiko - try to cope with their isolation, wondering whether they will be 'rescued' at the end of the trial.... Neffy (Nefeli) decides to volunteer for Vaccine Biopharm on a clinical trial, a sink or swim experiment after exposure to ‘dropsy virus’. This pandemic which is sweeping all before it causes horrific symptoms. The volunteers are literally lab rats but it is a desperate race against time. As the danger outside intensifies, Neffy learns of a device from one of the volunteers via which it’s possible to revisit the past. This well written novel takes us on this journey interspersed with letters Neffy writes to ‘H’ detailing her interest and love of octopus. 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.

Claire Fuller is a great writer but The Memory of Animals, her fifth novel, felt to me like two different books mashed into one: on the one hand, a dystopian, pandemic, survivalist thriller about a group of young people on a vaccine trial, and a second book about a marine biologist obsessed with octopuses and her late father. As the London streets outside the medical unit fall silent, and food begins to run out, Neffy must decide where safety lies. Might she find solace by revisiting her own heady memories of the past? Can she trust the strangers trapped inside with her - despite her growing suspicions? Or is her best chance of a future to be found in the terrifyingly unknown world outside? Time travel but not in the usual sense. A story about a pandemic, a very deadly one, where one of the symptoms is a loss of memory. Hats off to Claire Fuller for always writing original, creative, and well written books. I always get excited when I see she has a new one coming out. I was instantly drawn into the plot and wondered how things would turn out. I found this book to be gripping and hard to put down. The characters are interesting and there were some I liked, and some that were unlikeable, some who grated on my nerves.No mere survival story, the novel explores the isolation and grief that comes with outliving the people with whom you have unfinished business. This is about survival and human nature. I saw this playing out like a movie in my mind. Claire Fuller has delivered once again. She is a gifted writer, and I am always drawn in by her prose and plotlines. I enjoyed the tension in the book as Neffy questioned who she would trust while trying to survive. I also loved the sections where Neffy was writing to "H" about Octopuses. This worked very nicely in the story. The lead character is Neffy (Nefeli) who’s enrolled in a drug trial, a disgraced, former marine biologist, she’s in it solely for the money. A new virus known as dropsy is sweeping the globe, the situation’s bad but not extinction-level bad. Then a new mutation emerges and it becomes catastrophic. Neffy’s trial involves a dose of an experimental vaccine followed by infection with the initial virus. But when she wakes up, fully recovered, there are only four other people left in her enclosed medical unit. All are members of the trial, everyone else has long since fled. In excruciating detail the narrative follows Neffy and her fellow survivors as they slowly run down their remaining supplies. Their stories are broken up by an encounter with a new piece of tech brought in by one of their number. The Revisitor rather implausibly transforms memory into virtual reality, allowing people to relive their past in glorious technicolour, these episodes allow Neffy to experience key events in her life history which range from poignant to preposterous. Also breaking up the text are a series of letters to H, who turns out to be an octopus Neffy once worked with. The link here attempts to set up an analogy between the “caged” survivors and animal experimentation but, since animals have no choice when it comes to exploitation and suffering inflicted by humans, I didn’t find the suggested parallels convincing. As a variation on post-pandemic lit this is reasonably inventive but as science fiction it verges on incoherent, although I appreciated the attempt to incorporate messages related to animal welfare.

And what is this “revisiting” technology that Leon has created and how does it play into the story? There’s no one left, or hardly anyone. No one’s coming. At some point we’re going to have to go out and get more food and other stuff, or one of us is. Surely it’s better if the person who does that has the best chance of not catching it?’” It’s a line that could feature in the HBO series The Last of Us, one of many zeitgeist touches to be found in Claire Fuller’s new novel The Memory of Animals. The English author’s fifth novel is a taut and atmospheric read, an exploration of captivity, sacrifice and survival in a post-apocalyptic world. All of which is to say that there’s potential in the set-up here – this group of strangers, “[fraying] threads tied together by calamity and shared need, each tugging on an end hoping to make the knot firmer but risking undoing the messy tangle”. Well-versed in writing worst-case scenarios, Fuller’s got more past form than many of the authors who’ve been dipping their toes in apocalyptic tales of late, but The Memory of Animals still feels leaden. 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”.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. CLAIRE FULLER AT HER FINEST: A more high concept novel than Unsettled Ground, The Memory of Animals combines a gripping, speculative fiction plot with a beautifully written and affecting story of memory, love, octopuses and survival Neffy is participating in a clinical trial for a vaccine during a pandemic. While Neffy is in isolation, a new strain breaks out and the world descends into chaos. This is woven with Neffy’s letters to her beloved H and memories of her past. Haunting and unsettling, moving and thoughtful—with horror lurking at the edges—this is a subtle, elegant novel, an interesting and unusual take on the meaning of pandemic. Claire Fuller is a huge talent. As they agree to wait out the quarantine period that they had signed on for (maybe there still is someone in charge out there who will come to rescue them), Neffy learns that one of the others has brought the prototype of a device (The Revisitor) that allows a person to become deeply immersed in their own memories. Much of the novel is made up of her trips to the past, and as we witness long scenes from Neffy’s childhood and later family life, we eventually learn the real impulse behind her volunteering for the trial.

With the world outside unsafe, and only Neffy thought to be immune, the five volunteers form an uneasy agreement to stay put in case some kind of help is organised for them at the end of the trial. Fragile alliances form then shatter, and trust is in short supply. Fuller skilfully evokes the boredom and claustrophobia of days spent with strangers in a featureless, clinical building. But their supplies won’t last until the trial end date, and pressure builds on Neffy to brave the outside world; at the same time, she has a growing sense that the others have a plan they haven’t shared with her. The darkness, eeriness, almost dystopian world is thrust upon us as we continue to read. Especially as the group finds their way out of the clinic, and through London. The situation has disintegrated so rapidly that most of the other volunteers have not received the vaccine. A sketchily depicted quartet of young Londoners has chosen to remain in the clinic regardless and as the novel’s pacy beginning settles into a stretch of becalmed days that constitutes the bulk of the narrative, Neffy becomes embroiled in their volatile dynamics. Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for my proof copy of this book to read and review, all opinions are entirely my own.

Book Summary

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. But when the world outside her hospital window is utterly transformed, Neffy finds herself abandoned – along with the remaining four other volunteers – in a future they never believed could actually unfold. This interview about The Memory of Animals with Mark Reynolds was first published in Bookanista in April 2023. I really like Claire Fuller's writing, and have been looking forward to reading this. It feels quite different to the other novels I have read by her, but you still feel yourself in entirely capable hands.