I loved the book …..I’m simply in heaven when reading Claire Fuller’s books…..(each one so different)….yet each one has elements of mystery, controversy, and suspense without being overly dramatic. I didn't hate it - again, I'd have stopped early on if I had - but the whole thing just felt extremely underwhelming and ultimately unmemorable. I almost feel like it could have been a short story rather than a novel, that's how much of its content I felt was unnecessary. I think a lot of people will really love this one, but it ultimately wasn't really for me. As Neffy is awakening after a few days after receiving the virus, news from the outside world worsens. Inside, “time has folded in on itself.” 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

BookBrowse Review

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. The Memory of Animals is clearly a Claire Fuller novel right from the off. It's strange and interesting and dystopian with the accent being on relationships. It is what she does so very well. 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....

The Memory of Animals is a taut and emotionally charged novel about freedom and captivity, survival and sacrifice and whether you can save anyone before you save yourself. 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? We learn right away that she has volunteered for an experimental vaccine study that had never once been tried on humans. She would be in a hospital— isolated in her room —for three weeks. 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.

Media Reviews

And what is this “revisiting” technology that Leon has created and how does it play into the story? An imaginative blend of science and spirit. . . . Claire Fuller has siphoned all of the beauty of being human into this work.