A haunting novel about love, survival and everything in between ... one to get excited about' Stylist, Best Modern Dystopia 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. 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.

Dropsy caused a range of symptoms….including swelling of some organs, nerve damage, and sensory damage. The world is experiencing a pandemic with traumatic symptoms such as memory loss, sensory damage, swelling, and death. The world is in desperate need of a vaccine. Neffy, a disgraced marine biologist, along with her fellow volunteers: Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper, agree to take part in a vaccine trial. Some will be infected with the virus while others are not. The stakes are high as this might just be the last chance to save the world! The danger and terror are mounting in the outside world as people try to get supplies, gather resources all while falling ill and chaos ensues. In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease’s devastating symptoms: sensory damage, memory loss, death. Neffy, a disgraced and desperately indebted twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, registers for an experimental vaccine trial in London―perhaps humanity’s last hope for a cure. Though isolated from the chaos outside, she and the other volunteers―Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper―cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there. 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”. And what is this “revisiting” technology that Leon has created and how does it play into the story? Haunting and unsettling, moving and thoughtful, with horror lurking at the edges, this is a subtle, elegant novel. Claire Fuller is a huge talent' Lucy Atkins, author of Magpie Lane

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. The story follows their fight to continue, make decisions as to how to survive and Neffy is given the opportunity to revisit her past. Humans are useless at learning from their mistakes. We just have to keep making new plans,” Piper says. When Fuller releases something, you should probably pay attention. This dystopia is giving off thriller vibes with its pandemic reality, the complications of squid, and survival.I haven’t read anything dystopian/apocalyptic/pandemic based since 2019 but had trust in Fuller to handle this with care. This was well founded, the tragedy was not lost in the story. I found the early part of the novel eerily familiar. 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?” 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? The Memory of Animals has done the impossible—made me eagerly anticipate a novel that involves a pandemic in the year 2023. It’s also got: experimental technology that allows users to revisit their memories, marine biology, and promises to be an immersive, thought-provoking, and haunting-in-a-good-way literary masterwork. 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.

Fuller writes brilliantly about desire and the heady beginnings of new relationships. Neffy recalls intimate moments with her boyfriend Justin: “Like starting a fire that spreads outwards until it gets to my hands and the soles of my feet and sets them alight.” Past memories (or revisits) such as these work to humanise the loss the characters feel. The book is also peppered with knowledge, another trademark of Fuller’s writing. Who knew that an octopus has the same level of intelligence as a three-year-old human, or half a billion neurons located throughout its body? 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.My fifth novel, The Memory of Animals will be published in the UK by Penguin on 20th April 2023, and by Tin House in the US and Canada in June 2023. It will also be published in Spain, Catalonia, Germany and France. 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. 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? Unsettling, moving and thoughtful, with horror lurking at the edges, this is a subtle, elegant novel. Claire Fuller is a huge talent' Lucy Atkins, author of Magpie Lane