Emergency

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, awoman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegadebull, 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 competingfor space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spreadout from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distantpower.

‘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