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Start giftingEmergency
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreFor 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 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.
Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a US National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honorarium. Her essay “The Second Body,” a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.
Barrie Kreinik is an actor, singer, playwright, and voice-dialect coach based in New York City. Her audiobook narrations have earned an AudioFile Earphones Award. A graduate of the Brown/Trinity MFA acting program, she is a proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA.
Reviews
“Past and present, nature and humanity, life and death intermix, ebbing and flowing in a stream of prose that carries the reader on an exhilarating…and violent ride.”
“[A] unusual novel of minute, lush observation…in which the landscape reflects at every turn the imprint of the human world in its management, exploitation, or collaborative reimagining…A stunning book—a balm for our times—containing the incredible gift of the everyday.”
“This book succeeds because of…its insistence that there is no distinction between humans and environments.”
“Emergency is a pastoral novel for the age of dissolving boundaries.”
“An incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.”
“A common fragility unites all species in this quietly magnificent novel.”
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