For readers of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Odell, a lyrical work of
autofiction that explores the dissolution of boundaries between the self
and our earth as we head towards ecological catastrophe.
"Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and
industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of
consciousness."
--Ayşegül Savaş, author of Walking on the Ceiling
Emergency is a novel about the interconnectedness of all life on
Earth. Our narrator is at home during lockdown, where she ponders both
past and present. She remembers her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire.
She recalls a kestrel hunt, helping a farmer save a renegade bull, and
days playing with her best friend, Clare. In her village, neighbors
argue, keep secrets, care for one another, and try to hold down jobs.
Fox cubs fight in the woods, plants compete for space, a quarry slowly
falls apart, and we see a three-legged deer who likes cake. With
painterly vision, Hildyard evokes the bygone, pre-internet world of her
schooldays, whose irretrievability signals at something far greater than
fleeting youth. With urgent intimacy, Emergency asks us to look at the
essential; the people who help define us, animals, local and global
ecologies, and to consider what the slow disappearance of Hildyard's and
our own native environment might mean for humanity at large.
A requiem for the English countryside, a story of remote violence, and a
work of praise for a persistently lively world, Daisy Hildyard's
Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.
