In 2015, novelist Claire Fuller debuted with Our Endless Numbered Days, the story of a girl kidnapped by her survivalist father and raised in the wilderness, where she’s led to believe they are the only two people left alive after a nuclear apocalypse. She has gone on to create other such potently enclosed worlds in books including Bitter Orange and the Costa novel prize-winning Unsettled Ground, often using that same rural remoteness to enhance the feeling of isolation and its accompanying sense of slow-burn jeopardy.
Her latest, The Memory of Animals, is set largely in London and yet takes her preoccupation with characters cut off from the rest of society to another level. Within a few short chapters, the apocalypse that turned out not to have happened in Fuller’s first novel really has taken place, although its trigger is not bombs but a deadly pandemic.
