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. This is a pandemic novel, yes, but one that radically transcends the label.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 The entwined pain and pleasure of memory is at the heart of Neffy’s story, as is the hard work of establishing trust and finding forgiveness, particularly for oneself.

Fuller’s intricately structured narrative makes great use of the Revisiting conceit, allowing Neffy’s history-including her love for an octopus she once cared for at an aquarium-to wrap itself around an increasingly nightmarish present, as Neffy uncovers secrets about the virus’s progression that other volunteers have been keeping from her. Neffy, who may have developed immunity, is identified as the group’s best hope for the future, but after fellow test subject Leon introduces her to a new technology called Revisiting, which allows her to relive moments from her past, she becomes increasingly drawn to the treatment. While Neffy and her fellow volunteers are isolated in a London hospital as they undergo treatment, the virus, nicknamed “Dropsy,” develops a new and deadly variant, which causes sudden memory loss before certain death. Twenty-something Neffy, still grieving the loss of her father and embarrassed by the crumbling of her marine biology career after a professional misstep, signs up as a vaccine test subject during the early days of the pandemic. Fuller ( Unsettled Ground) crafts a haunting novel of second chances set in a near-future pandemic.

The memory of animals claire fuller