The Memory of Animals: From the Costa Novel Award-winning author of Unsettled Ground

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Thank you to Tin House and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own. Simply and effectively structured in the time period before and after Day Zero, a pandemic of gargantuan devastation, the narrative asks important, resonant questions of life in extremis. How do we divide resources, how do we decide who is worthy of help, what do we do when society breaks down, when there’s no one left to monitor right and wrong? And underpinning all these questions, the most pressing one: in a world where everyone is struggling to stay alive, who gets to survive? 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. The Memory of Animalsis a taut and emotionally charged novel about freedom and captivity, survival and sacrifice and whether you can save anyone before you save yourself.” It looks at moral, ethical, psychological, relational and emotional issues that arise for this group after events go very bad in the clinic. It shows you how the best and worst can come out of the group when faced with fear of the unknown and questions of survival.

For anyone who misses the analogy, Fuller spends the rest of the book ramming it home in a series of letters Neffy writes to – wait for it – an octopus, which she looked after in her past life as a marine biologist. Yes, you heard me correctly: ­epistles to a cephalopod. What the point of these missives is, though – other than an opportunity for some pretty purple prose and an excuse to bombard the reader with facts that read like they’ve been cribbed from Wikipedia – I’m not really sure. It looks suspiciously like padding. part* of the editor’s notes—(there is more)— and as a reader, I appreciate the way we are set up to begin this story! No mere survival story, the novel explores the isolation and grief that comes with outliving the people with whom you have unfinished business. 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 events in her life history 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 taut and emotionally charged novel about freedom and captivity, survival and sacrifice and whether you can save anyone before you save yourself.

The idea of this was used in a scene in the final book but it was substantially changed, as were Kit, Alice, Marjorie and James! A Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Gizmodo, Shondaland, LitHub& Tor.com Best Book of Summer and Good Housekeeping Best Book of 2023 So Far! There’s the pandemic….people were dying. The virus [Dropsy virus] was spreading everywhere; people were terrified. 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.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for my proof copy of this book to read and review, all opinions are entirely my own.

Featured Reviews

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. It's certainly a new twist on a pandemic novel and the book despite the circumstances, doesn't dwell on that aspect. 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?