n The Memory of Animals, Claire Fuller tells the story of Neffy, a volunteer in a medical trial for a new vaccine during a pandemic caused by the ‘Dropsy virus’. With an untested vaccine, the situation is risky, and when Neffy wakes up, she finds herself alone in the test centre with only a few fellow Guinea Pigs. They must survive in a world where it seems like everyone else is dying.

Fuller’s dystopian novel feels uncomfortably realistic due to the subject matter – we’ve all lived through a pandemic recently – but for me that made it more interesting, though unsettling too. The book is multilayered, with Neffy’s memories of her parents, revealing more about her family life and the reason behind her decision to volunteer for the paid trial. While the letters Neffy writes to ‘H,’ an octopus she once knew as a marine biologist, weren’t as interesting to read about, they added a unique dimension to the story.

The pace of the book could have been faster, and the plot didn’t entirely live up to my expectations. I anticipated more danger and information about the urgent pandemic world, but most of the story centred around Neffy inside the trial centre and her pre-virus memories. Nevertheless, the skilful writing by Fuller made it an enjoyable read, and while it didn’t blow me away, I appreciated the book’s quality.

Although I may have set my expectations too high based on my love for Fuller’s Unsettled Ground, The Memory of Animals is still an interesting and enjoyable read.

Book Review...

'The Memory of Animals' by Claire Fuller

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.

It sounds wacky and to some extent it maybe is but it works and it works so well. I was drawn to Neffy immediately and felt such empathy towards her. I was totally engrossed by the plot which moves quickly and deflty weaves together a number of strands. The description of the pandemic felt very familiar and real and this made it an easy step to visualising everything that came after. It's a dark and deliciously unsettling read which continues to linger in my mind weeks later and which I will no doubt pick up again.

Claire Fuller is an author who’s work continues to surprises me. I never know what to expect and this book is no exception. For the first time in her published work she has delved into the realm of speculative fiction, almost sci-fi but with a contemporary or very near future setting.

I am sure many writers in the middle of our recent pandemic may have played with the idea of what may happen if the disease was truly deadly, but she has ran with it and although the story can be bleak, the violence and death is mostly played off camera. This may well be a little bit too close to home for some readers but this isn’t Covid, it’s something much worse, more scary but fairly improbable by epidemiological standards. My main criticism is that any disease that made people as sick as this one seemed to, it would never spread widely as it’s victims would be confined to bed.

The narrative device of the prototype technology that lets her revisit childhood memories was a clever way to introduce an alternative timeline in a natural seeming way.

Neffy also writes letters addressed to Dearest H which all centre around Octopuses (or Octopodes if you prefer) and her work with them and they are a delightful restbit from all the tension and carnage.

All the characters are in their 20’s and this is not a particularly kind portrait of that generation. They mainly come across as flaky and selfish, not so much the protagonist but the rest of the group.

This is often quite bleak but the ending is guardedly hopeful. So much so that I wonder if there is any possibility of a sequel, but as she hasn’t written one to any of her other books it’s unlikely.

What I liked:
I loved the Dearest H octopus interludes.

What didn’t work for me:
Unlikable characters

Due to be posted on my blog on the 27th April 2023

Read this in one sitting as I just couldn't put it down! I have been a fan of Fuller's writing for many years and this latest offering The Memory of Animals is just as much a treat. This is my favourite type of dystopian fiction where the bleak, dark ravaged world is blended with an exploration of the beauty of what it means to be human. I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion in this novel about animal rights, freedom of choice about how we live and die, and confinement both of people and animals and how similar the two situations are despite the way we tend to believe they're somehow different. The writing is vivid and moving, and the compelling plot keeps you engaged from start to finish. The kind of book that will stay with me for a long time after finishing it.
This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

This is a deeply unsettling and haunting read but also completely engrossing and once I was halfway through I couldn’t put it down until I was finished. Neffy is a marine biologist who feels a special affinity to octopus. A global pandemic begins and she volunteers for a trial vaccine. The story then revisits all her vivid memories that led her to volunteering for the trial whilst she navigates the pandemic. I’m still not sure I was ready to read fiction about a pandemic but Fuller’s writing is vivid and compelling and propelled me through that doubt.

This book is not what I expected from the author of Unsettled Ground. It's a tense, speculative novel about a pandemic which feels very real in parts. The build up effectively creates a feeling of suspension but it struggles to keep that going. Overall, I liked this book and would recommend it for fans of Leave The World Behind.

Probably inevitable that Claire Fuller’s dystopian novel of a world devastated by a plague and the few remaining survivors should carry so many echoes of earlier works from The Day of the Triffids to Survivors to The Hopkins Manuscript and Resident Evil. However, unlike these particular forerunners, and despite the range of familiar markers – deserted streets, roaming gangs - there’s something curiously flat about Fuller’s narrative, for me at least, it lacked urgency or any real sense of peril. Part of the problem may be that it’s more character centred than plot driven. Although the writing itself is decent, it’s very matter of fact and the story oddly sanitised, and I just didn’t find the characters terribly interesting or engaging. Nor is there any sense of a sustained, broader philosophical or pseudo-philosophical exploration underlying the surface. Although things do pick up at various points.

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 aspects of her experiences 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.

The Memory of Animals is a superb apocalyptic pandemic novel with a little bit of science fiction which allows the main character Neffy to "revisit" her memories of her family growing up. Claire Fuller has managed to create a gripping near-future London which is terrifying but totally believable.

A highly recommended read for people who love human stories and thinking "how would I react in that situation?"

What an amazing read.
So raw and emotionally gripping. I am skeptical of pandemic books in a post covid world but you truly get so caught up in Neffy’s memories that the pandemic part seems to be forgotten.
A book I would not have picked up in store but has become an early book of the year for me.
Loved this!

In the midst of a very deadly pandemic we meet Neffy as she volunteers for an experimental vaccine trial. She needs the money after losing her previous job as a marine biologist. In flashback we see glimpses of what also lead her to this point in her life, her work, her family, her past.
And then the trial goes a bit wrong and all the medical staff, and some volunteers disappear. Leaving the few remaining volunteers to get on with things on their own. Eking out their meagre food stocks. Trying to survive until they are rescued.
One of the volunteers, Leon, has been working on a new technology, one that allows a person to revisit memories as if they were really happening. It only works with some people but Neffy is a natural. And we start to see more of her life before...
The whole picture starts to build up slowly. And with each piece added it all starts to come together. In a way that I will leave you to discover as the author intends. The road ahead is not smooth for the remaining volunteers, and cracks start to show in their relationships.
One thing I did love about this book was that I also learned a whole lot about the octopus. I have always found them to be fascinating creatures, highly intelligent, and good at predicting winners of sports matches! But aside from that, knew little about what made them tick. I do now and feel richer for that knowledge.
The pandemic is a bit scary. Probably only cos we now have personal knowledge of that kind of scenario. Although the one in this book is way nastier and much more fatal that covid ever was (to the majority) but the experimental vaccine trial felt more real.
The whole "relationship" with H was also a bit weird but wonderfully so when the whole truth came out. Stick with it!
And the ending - after about half way I was wondering how on earth the author would be able to finish this book. So much so that I couldn't even contemplate guessing. But she did, and it was perfect.
All in all, another winner from another of my favourite authors - please do also check out Bitter Orange, Swimming Lessons, Unsettled Ground, and Our Endless Numbered Days.
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

4/5 stars

I was a bit apprehensive to hear this novel described as a ‘pandemic novel’ but don’t let this put you off. Yes, it’s initially about a group of young adults taking part in a vaccine trial, and yes, a fictional pandemic is raging outside their sealed clinic building, but ultimately it is so much more than this.

Claire Fuller always crafts well-defined characters with distinct voices in her novels and this was no exception. Each had their own reasons for being on the (paid) vaccine trial, and their backstories gently emerge as the story progressed. I loved the careful observation of the different roles people play in a group under pressure - the organiser, the anxious one, the disrupter, the voice of reason etc - we saw elements of all these characters.

The theme of memory is apparent throughout and the main character Neffy’s recalled interactions with octopuses, which are interspersed between chapters in the form of letters, are interesting and informative.

Perhaps the only aspect of the novel I didn’t like was the introduction of a piece of fictional technology called a ‘Revisitor’ which allowed Neffy to re-experience past memories and therefore conveniently drop lumps of backstory into the text. It seemed a bit contrived really.

But overall a thoroughly enjoyable read which very much had me gripped from the outset and which I completed in just two days as a result.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for this honest review.

2.5 stars.
Things I think this did well:
- I liked the prose in general and I think it did a good job of building up the tension and fear surrounding the pandemic and Neffy not knowing what was going on.
- In general I enjoyed the present day time line around pandemic and the aftermath, and how all the characters were struggling to cope.

Things that didn't quite work for me:
- I didn't mind the flashbacks, I feel like the relationship with her father played in well with the overall themes, but the Revisitor technology was a bit odd for me, just sort of felt like it came out of nowhere. I also think there was too much flashback and it reallllly bogged down the pacing of the middle of the book. It's hard to care about some teenager doing basically nothing in Greece when the other timeline is people struggling for survival in a pandemic.
- Why did she need to be in a relationship with her step brother? Why did we need explicit sex scenes of them together? I know they meet as adults but this was a Choice that was made and it really didn't feel necessary at allllll
- I think I got what the author was going for with the letters to the octopus, but I really can't say it was pulled off for me in the end. It just didn't quite click.
- The pandemic stuff felt rushed at the end and like we didn't really get close enough to the characters. They <spoiler> spend most of the book being like oh should we starve to death or go outside (which has an obvious answer) and then when they do leave and stuff happens it's rushed over in a single chapter. </spoiler>
- Also something that bothered me: <spoiler> The whole thing about Neffy's potential children also being immune just makes zero sense to me, that's not how vaccines work </spoiler>

Thank you to Fig Tree/Penguin and NetGalley for providing this as an eARC to review!

Similar to Everything You Ever Wanted and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Memory of Animals is a pandemic book about captivity, escapism and survival.

I quite enjoyed the concept but it leaned more literary than I was expecting, and it didn't quite have the tinge of weird that I enjoy in these sorts of books. Unlike something like Earthlings which explores similar ideas about humans being animals, but then going for a cannibalism route, this one went more of a sexual direction which I didn't LOVE. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the main character boning her stepbrother (but one of the other characters openly okay'd it so maybe I'm just a hater or didn't get the ~ meaning ~).

A dystopian look at the isolation and devastation of a worst-case-scenario COVID world, but I don't know that it quite went the direction I was hoping.

This Netgalley arc is a sort of dystopian read and a sort of Covid novel, but not a Covid novel. The world is in a pandemic as the dropsy virus runs amok, a virus which causes bodies, organs to swell and memory to fail. Neffy signs on as a volunteer to be a human guinea pig for a trial for a vaccine for the virus. This is almost the last chance for the scientists to save mankind. The vaccine and th virus makes her ill and when she does finally come around after about a week, the London she knew has changed. The virus is widespread and she is locked in the facility with four other volunteers - four volunteers who never had the vaccine or the virus - trial were halted after seeing Neffy's reaction - so is she the only immune person? Alongside this there are two other narratives. One of the volunteers has a device - the Revisitor - which allows the recipient to revist past memories. Neffy almost becomes addicted to this device and we follow her as she lives again through her memories and we come to understand why she signed up for the trial and we see her grief and loss. There are also Neffy's letters to My dear H which tells us of her love of octopuses. Neffy was a marine biologist who was never entirely happy with the experiments carried out on the marine creatures and she hated the fact that there were kept captive. Irony here - she is having an experiment carried out on her and she and the other four volunteers are now effectively captive in the facility while the virus swirls around outside. In my opinion this is a novel about relationships more than the pandemic, it is how humans behave in a crisis - how humans try to survive. Neffy is a complex character but ultimately she is a character who cares and so we care for her. And the ending - I wasn't expecting it at all. Gave me plenty to think about. A great read.

In 'The Memory of Animals' by Claire Fuller, a pandemic is sweeping the world. For many reasons, Neffy volunteers to be part of a clinical trial seeking a vaccine for the virus. Couped up in her room, and subsequently in an abandoned building with other participants in the trial. Neffy is assailed by memories from the past. This is aided by her use of the 'Revisitor,' a prototype technology that enables some subjects to be able to re-access their memories. Fuller's narrative is split between the current fight for survival, past memories, and weirdly letters to an octopus called H.

I really enjoyed this story, although the recent Covid Pandemic made it sometimes feel like the novels premise was a little too plausible. The focus on relationships, both in the present and in Neffy's past, meant that this wasn't just a dystopian novel. Instead, it was deeply touching and it forces the reader to consider how they would react in Neffy's place. I also felt that the octopus thread that flowed throughout the novel worked well and added to its originality. My only slight query was the ending, which felt a bit rushed and abandoned. However, as much of the novel revolved around the response to the virus being rushed and abandoning, maybe that was the point!

I’ve read a couple of books by this author so was excited to see that she had another one coming out. That said, it’s very, very different to her other books. It’s a thought-provoking dystopian/post-apocalyptic based read. I didn’t really understand the end, which is normal for me when reading dystopian novels 🤦🏻‍♀️
I feel this will be a bit of a marmite book for 2023!
Thanks to NetGalley, Penguin General UK - Fig Tree, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Penguin Life, Penguin Business, Fig Tree for the opportunity to read and review this haunting read.

Thank you so much to the publishers for letting me read this book ahead of its release! The Memory of Animals follows a woman, and a small group of people, who take part in a clinical trial for a drug to prevent contagion of a virus. Sound familiar? I actually found this book a bit too close to home in parts, I think you would definitely have to be in the right frame of mind to read it as the pandemic is still so fresh and I don’t think the content of this book will appeal to everyone. That being said, the writing is stunning and the story flows easily. There’s also some stuff with an octopus and if that doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what will. Overall an enjoyable read but might be heavy or too relatable for some.

The Memory of Animals, By Claire Fuller
Rating: 4/5
Published: NOW
Another beautiful page-turner by the Costa Novel Award Winner! Neffy answers the call to volunteer in a vaccine trial, and enters a medical unit in London. She is haunted by the grief of losing her father, and seeks to make amends by doing something good. However, after receiving the virus and vaccine, the world begins to change around her. The nurses and doctors flee the unit, and Neffy is left with four other volunteers who warn of the dangers of going outside. Neffy is unsure if she can trust any of them, and is constantly torn between staying or leaving. Whilst in the Unit, one of the volunteers introduces her to a new technology which allows her to regress back into her memories, which Neffy loves, but she still isn’t sure if she can trust the others around her.
This novel is elegantly told. It explores the emotional turmoil of freedom and captivity, and what mankind will do to protect itself. The beautiful juxta-positioning of the octopus sequences adds a haunting and interesting edge, which I enjoyed immensely. I loved trying to figure out what the characters were hiding. The novel has an almost dystopian feel to it, but Fuller’s raw and visceral writing sucks the reader in, and makes the situation seem entirely plausible and possible. When reading in the context of recently emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, it forces you to question how far we would have gone if the virus had become uncontainable.

Another wonderful novel from the incredibly talented Claire Fuller. A fantastic dystopian story with a touch of science fiction and....octopuses. A fantastic, engrossing read.

Welp, this was an odd one..

I really loved about half of this book - we follow Neffy who has volunteered for a controlled vaccine trial, in the hopes of paying off some debts and redeeming herself for the one big mistake that derailed her career. All external communications are cut off and suddenly only Neffy and four other volunteers remain in the unit, leaving Neffy to wonder if safety lies inside or beyond the unit..

This part on its own was brilliant. I loved reading about the sickness that had spread and all about the vaccine trials, and the peril that ensued when this small group were left to fend for themselves.

But then there was another dystopian aspect thrown in - a technology that allows Neffy to revisit memories, which she becomes more and more reliant on to escape the perilous present. Again, a really interesting concept in terms of the tech and how she was able to move around within her memories - this was all told brilliantly. But it just felt a bit confused in an otherwise seemingly apocalyptic novel?

And THEN, there were the letters to an Octopus interspersed between chapters.. yep. A literal octopus. I don’t know if this all just went way over my head but I felt like this was three books in one and I didn’t understand how they all fit together, even in the end.

Still giving it 3 stars as I did really enjoy the dystopian stories and concepts, albeit being very disjointed and confused!