Emergency
A Pastoral Novel

Winner of the 2023 RSL Encore Prize for second novels Also shortlisted for the 2023 Folio Prize If the invisible air was loaded with invisible poisons, if my own bloodstream could be modelled by its tiniest contaminant component, then it was only logical to understand that the infinitely detailed......more

Winner of the Encore Award 2023 for second novels It occurred to me then that the ash tree itself had made the cake, or consumed it. The tree, like all the things that rampaged on its dead body, like Soldier, like the rabbits like the moss on the side of Clare's house, like the kestrel and the vole —......more

Could a book be too rambly? this was my problem with Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency. Theoretically I should love a book like this as the majority of it consists of detailed descriptions of nature be it rabbits or a three legged deer with a penchant for cakes and yet I couldn’t really get into the narrat......more

luminous!!! Read this. It will change the way you think forever (coming from an urban city girlie). I loved this book so much I wrote 1000 more words than my essay required and then had to kill those darlings off. Made me think about lockdown and covid in original and surprising ways - which is a to......more

I expect Emergency will be welcomed differently by readers of fiction and of nonfiction. It is, of course, a work of fiction, but nearly all of the book's blurbs characterize it as a meditation on the climate crisis. What? I wouldn't have read it as any sort of environmental essay otherwise, because......more