Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

A literary late-starter, she originally trained as a sculptor and the settings she crafts generally have a powerful physical presence.

The letters are one of two rather gimmicky devices that Fuller uses to reveal the mess Neffy has made of her young life, the other being the prototype of a device called a “Revisitor”, which allows users to relive memories with virtual-reality-like intensity, handily brought along by one of Neffy’s new clinic companions.Ĭlose attention to the world around her has always been a magnetic strength of Fuller’s work. There’s also the altogether more surreal matter of why she is writing letters to an octopus she once cared for in an aquarium. It keeps the pages turning, enabling Fuller to ponder the choices we make in order to survive, but like her survivors, scrolling through old photos on their defunct smartphones, she’d rather look to the past, bidding us to wonder why Neffy needed the trial fee so badly and dropping hints of something illicit in her relationship with the lover who tried to talk her out of it. Close attention to the world around her has always been a magnetic strength of Fuller’s work She senses that the others have a plan she’s not privy to and she’ll discover more secrets besides.

With supplies running low, Neffy, the only one with potential immunity, feels pressure to go and forage. In part, that’s a reflection of the characters’ states of mind: they’re in shock, clinging to relics of the world they knew. A sketchily depicted quartet of young Londoners has chosen to remain in the clinic regardless and as the novel’s pacy beginning settles into a stretch of becalmed days that constitutes the bulk of the narrative, Neffy becomes embroiled in their volatile dynamics.ĭespite some promising themes and motifs, this is an uneven novel. The situation has disintegrated so rapidly that most of the other volunteers have not received the vaccine. It’s already too late, however: when she arrived at the clinic, reports were already circulating of a fast-acting variant that impacts memory and the brain, and by the time she pulls through, the staff have deserted the building, packs of dogs roam eerily silent streets and there’s no internet, phone service or television reception. She becomes perilously ill, but the vaccine appears to work. Neffy is its protagonist, a 27-year-old marine biologist who enlists in a paid trial of a vaccine against the so-called dropsy virus.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller