She wakes to discover that the entire medical staff and most of the volunteers have abandoned the lab. Neffy becomes ill and loses consciousness for several days. She has agreed to being “given a vaccine which was untested on humans, and then the virus which everyone was terrified of catching, and to sit in a room on my own for three weeks”. Neffy is one of 16 volunteers participating in a research trial. 'Haunting and unsettling, moving and thoughtful, with horror lurking at the edges, this is a subtle, elegant novel.In Claire Fuller’s fifth novel, The Memory of Animals, the dropsy virus is sweeping the world “causing disorientation, memory loss, seizures and coma”.
Claire Fuller is a huge talent' Lucy Atkins, author of Magpie Lane 'Haunting and unsettling, moving and thoughtful, with horror lurking at the edges, this is a subtle, elegant novel. Terrific!' Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures 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. But in this new world where survival rests on the bonds between strangers, is she jeopardising any chance of a future?
Intoxicated by the freedom of the past and the chance to reunite with those she loves, she increasingly turns away from her perilous present. While she weighs up her choices, she is introduced to a pioneering and controversial technology which allows her to revisit memories from her life before: a childhood divided between her enigmatic mother and her father in his small hotel in Greece.
Does safety lie inside or beyond the unit? And who, or what is out there? With food running out, and a growing sense that the strangers she is with may be holding back secrets, Neffy has questions that no one can answer. When she answers the call to volunteer in a controlled vaccine trial, it offers her a way to pay off her many debts and, perhaps, to make up for the past.īut when the London streets below her window fall silent, and all external communications cease, only Neffy and four other volunteers remain in the unit.
Neffy is a young woman running away from grief and guilt, and the one big mistake that has derailed her career. From the Costa-Winning, Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground: a gripping, haunting novel about memory, love and survival, for readers of Never Let me Go and Leave the World Behind
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