Author(s): Daisy Hildyard

Novel | England | 2023 Folio Prize short list

A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard's Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era. Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power.  'Its prose is bewitching and uncompromising, alive to the enmeshing of cruelty with care that articulates our shared - human and nonhuman - existence.' - Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

Review: 'Rich and unflinching, this writing expands our sense of what it means to live, as we do, in a time of crisis. It leads usbeyond rational climate debates into the deeply sensual, and sometimes nightmarish, places where our inner and outerworlds make contact.'- Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr Field

'In this powerfully attuned novel, the world presses in on all sides, refusing to become background. From the discardedplastics of the narrator's childhood, now circulating microscopically in the world around her as an adult, to the journeyof grass through the bodies of animals and back out to the field as fertilizer, Emergency shows us the cost, as well as theconflicted splendour, of a world that is "fatally interconnected". Its prose is bewitching and uncompromising, alive to theenmeshing of cruelty with care that articulates our shared - human and nonhuman - existence.'- Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

'Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into atapestry of consciousness.'- Ay?egl Sava?, author of Walking on the Ceiling

'Hildyard's writing stretches the mind.'- Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

Author Biography: Daisy Hildyard holds a PhD in the history of science, and has previously published essays on the language of science, and on seventeenth-century mathematics. Her first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a '5 under 35' honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. 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