The Memory of Animals

From the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange, & Unsettled Ground comes a beautiful & searing novel of memory, love, survival--& octopuses.

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 & 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 & the other volunteers―Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, & Piper―cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there.

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 & the one mistake that ended her career. The lines between past, present, & future begin to blur, & 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 is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival & suspense, grief & hope, consequences & connectedness, that asks what truly defines us―and the lengths we will go to rescue ourselves & those we love.

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Claire Fuller was born in Oxfordshire in 1967. She gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but she went on to have a long career in marketing & didn’t start writing fiction until she was 40. Author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; & Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award & was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.