Authors on Tap: Claire Fuller and Lindsay Hunter

Please join us in store on Tuesday, June 13th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Claire Fuller's new novel, The Memory of Animals.  Claire will be in conversation wtih Exile MVP Lindsay Hunter! 

About The Memory of Animals:

In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease causing sensory damage, nerve loss, and, in most cases, 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?

Claire Fuller's 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.

About the authors:

In addition to her latest novel, The Memory of Animals (Tin House), Claire Fuller is the author of Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; and Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire, England with her husband.

Lindsay Hunter received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She co-founded and co-hosted the groundbreaking Quickies! reading series, an event that focused on flash fiction. Her first book, Daddy’s, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2010 by Featherproof Books, a boutique press in Chicago. Her second collection, DON’T KISS ME, was published by FSG Originals in 2013 and was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her first novel, Ugly Girls, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2014. The Huffington Post called it “a story that hits a note that’s been missing from the chorus of existing feminist literature.” Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection, a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, and a 2017 NPR Great Read. Along with the writer Alex Higley, she runs the podcast I’m a Writer But, a series about writers with kids, jobs, and/or lives, and how they make it all work (or don’t). Lindsay’s fifth book, a novel titled Hot Springs Drive,is forthcoming on Roxane Gay Books in November 2023. She lives in Chicago with her family.

About the event:

This is a free, in person event and registration is required.  Please click on the link below to register for free.  Claire and Lindsay will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event?  We will have signed copies available in store and online and ship nationally! 

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