In The Memory of Animals, Fuller holds up a dark mirror to the pandemic, bringing a haunting credibility to her fictional Dropsy virus, which causes swelling in internal organs, progressing to memory loss and death as the strain mutates and strengthens.

There are shades of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, the futurist short stories in Margaret Atwood’s recent collection Old Babes in the Wood, or the accomplished opening story of Rebecca Miller’s Total. Her latest book sees her return to familiar themes – marginalised outsiders, the legacy of trauma, the fallibility of memory, among others – but in a scenario that is at once more overtly dystopian and yet strangely grounded in the real world. She has four previous novels: Unsettled Ground, which in 2021 won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award and Bitter Orange. 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?įuller is an artist from Oxfordshire who started writing when she was 40. 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. The English author’s fifth novel is a taut and atmospheric read, an exploration of captivity, sacrifice and survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Surely it’s better if the person who does that has the best chance of not catching it?’” It’s a line that could feature in the HBO series The Last of Us, one of many zeitgeist touches to be found in Claire Fuller’s new novel The Memory of Animals. At some point we’re going to have to go out and get more food and other stuff, or one of us is.

Claire fuller unsettled ground