The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9781959030577
- Page Count
- 288
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 5½ x 8½
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Claire Fuller
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.
“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.
Praise for The Memory of Animals
-
“A book of survival, consequences and connection.”
The Boston Globe, A Best Book of Summer -
“Imagine a ‘Lord of the Flies’ where everyone on the island has opted in; or a ‘Breakfast Club’ where anyone who leaves dies. . . . It’s a neat trick that Fuller pulls off, weaving together so many familiar threads, from the post-pandemic storyline to the extremity-in-isolation scenario to the life story reconceived under duress, and yet coming up with a new and promising pattern—an authorial performance in keeping with her generous character.”
The Washington Post -
“A haunting novel of second chances.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
About the Imprint
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