Claire Fuller

What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back? Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see._

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. In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease’s devastating symptoms: sensory damage, memory loss, death. Neffy, a disgraced and desperately indebted twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, registers for an experimental vaccine trial in London―perhaps humanity’s last hope for a cure. Though isolated from the chaos outside, she and the other volunteers―Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper―cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there. 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? The Memory of Animals is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival and suspense, grief and hope, consequences and connectedness, that asks what truly defines us―and the lengths we will go to rescue ourselves and those we love.

From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them—Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she's distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors’ private lives. To Frances' surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Scandalous and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a passionate and troubled marriage. 

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change. Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. And so her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything. Peggy is not seen again for another nine years. 1985: Peggy has returned to the family home. But what happened to her in the forest? And why has she come back now?

Neffy, una joven bióloga torturada por los errores que han hundido su carrera, decide ofrecerse como voluntaria para un ensayo clínico relacionado con una vacuna experimental. Tras una hecatombe en la que queda diezmada la humanidad, descubre que otro de los participantes en la prueba ha creado un dispositivo con el que es posible revisitar el pasado. Así, con la idea de refugiarse de la devastación que la rodea, Neffy se sumerge en los recuerdos de su infancia en Grecia, donde se reencontrará con su padre. Haciendo uso de una prosa despiadada y sobrecogedora, Claire Fuller da una vuelta de tuerca a la literatura distópica y enfrenta a su protagonista a una decisión imposible: saldar cuentas con los fantasmas de un mundo que ya no existe más que en su memoria o volver la vista hacia un futuro que se presenta caótico, terrorífico y desconocido. Una novela deslumbrante, con iguales dosis de ficción especulativa y alegato animalista.

Los mellizos Jeanie y Julius tienen 51 años y viven con su madre en una casa antigua en mitad de la campiña inglesa. No tienen internet, televisión ni cuentas bancarias. Ninguno de los dos tiene pareja. Tampoco tienen padre: murió cuando eran niños. Cultivan verduras en su huerto y tocan música juntos por las noches: sobreviven con poco y no se plantean más. Pero cuando Dot muere de forma repentina, todas las cosas de las que siempre han prescindido se vuelven más imprescindibles cada día. Jeanie y Julius se enfrentan a un mundo exterior desconocido e inabarcable y, cuando los secretos de su madre comienzan a salir a la luz, todo lo que creían saber sobre sus vidas se desmorona. Con sensibilidad e inteligencia, la autora compone un relato desgarrador sobre la pobreza rural en el siglo XXI y obliga al lector a mirar en esos rincones de la sociedad donde nadie entra nunca a limpiar el polvo.