A Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Gizmodo, Shondaland, LitHub & Tor.com Best Book of Summer and Good Housekeeping Best Book of 2023 So Far!
“A haunting novel of second chances.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
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.
In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease causing sensory damage, nerve loss, and, in most cases, 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. 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? Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival and suspense, grief and hope, consequences and connectedness that asks what truly defines us—and to what lengths we will go to rescue ourselves and those we love.
Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; and Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.
www.clairefuller.co.uk
Read an Excerpt
My phone has run out of battery. I lean out of the bed, almost at falling point, following the wire to plug it in. Rest. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and search around for the TV remote, pat the bedcovers, remember that there isn’t one. I see a glimpse of my skin between top and shorts, purple bruising on my sides and belly as though I have been kicked repeatedly. It’s sore when I press it. My shorts are wet and the sheet is wet too but I don’t smell anything. I tug the sheet off, resting after each movement, and push it under the bed with my toes. The plastic mattress is clammy. It will do. I sit. “Telly on,” I say, and it comes out as a croak, but the screen on the wall miraculously wakes, perhaps only to be polite. Some sitcom is showing with canned laughter. “Channel one,” I say. The television power button flashes but the programme doesn’t change. “Channel three,” I say, and the picture switches to an almost identical sitcom except the characters are Black and American. Channel four is showing horses, those white ones from the Camargue galloping through water. I skip through the channels, Sky and even CNN, which has a static picture of a CNN building and scrolling text that reads, An update will follow shortly. I leave it on this. The blinds on the exterior window are still up and it’s day outside. Is it morning or afternoon? All the toast and tea has been eaten and drunk although I don’t recall finishing it, and the plate and the cup are still there. I pause on the side of the bed, gathering strength, then stand and go to the window, and when I look to the east the sun is rising over London. At the end of the alley I see movement and I tense for what might be coming, but as I watch, a fallow deer trots around the corner. It’s young and long-legged, the spots on its orange coat easy to see. It stops below my window to look about and scratch behind its ear with a hind hoof and then something must scare it because, with a flick of its tail, it’s off. Across the alleyway Sophia’s blinds are up but her apartment is dark. She has written me a message: YES, I AM HEAR. I register the spelling mistake but I’m confused by what she’s written until I read the last one I stuck up which I don’t remember writing: ARE YOU THERE? I rest against the wall, legs weak and shaky, and turn back to my room to see the muddled duvet, a pillow under the bed with my dirty sheet, my water jug empty. A towel lies on the bathroom floor, my toothbrush beside it. No one has been in to clean, to take my pulse or my blood, to bring me food, to ask me my name and date of birth.
