Yes, you heard me correctly: epistles to a cephalopod. Our heroine, Neffy, is one of a small number of volunteers who’ve enrolled in a vaccine trial, and the novel opens with her arriving at the unit in central London where she’s agreed to be sequestered for the next month she and her fellow volunteers each sealed in their own room, like animals in a cage.įor 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. Like many recent novels, it takes inspiration from the pandemic, conjuring up a fictional plague – the “Dropsy” virus, which causes its victims’ organs to swell and damages their cognitive powers – resulting in similar containment measures to those used to battle Covid: lockdowns and a fevered rush to find a vaccine. What a disappointment, then, to discover that her latest offering, The Memory of Animals, is a bit of a mess: a hodgepodge of weirdly disparate plot threads, all rather laboriously and unconvincingly cobbled together with cheap sentiment. Her debut, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), won the Desmond Elliott Prize Swimming Lessons (2017) was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award and Unsettled Ground was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the 2021 Costa Novel Award. Claire Fuller’s first four novels have garnered her notable acclaim.

Claire fuller unsettled ground review