Daisy Hildyard – Emergency

We can't wait to welcome Daisy Hildyard to the bookshop for an event to celebrate her new novel, Emergency, on the day of its publication! She will be in conversation with Edinburgh-based writer, Alice Tarbuck.

About Emergency:

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 fox cubs 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. 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.

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.

Alice Tarbuck is a writer and literature professional living in Edinburgh. Their first book, A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and six centuries) of Magic was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2020. With Claire Askew, they are editors of a forthcoming anthology, The Modern Craft, from Watkins.

We are planning for this event to take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. On the night of the event, our team will be wearing masks and we encourage you to do the same, unless you are exempt. This will keep things as safe as possible for authors, audience members and our booksellers.

In-person Audience: you can purchase a signed – and if requested, dedicated – copy of Emergency, a £5 Voucher OR a Free In-person Audience Ticket.

Livestream: you can purchase a signed – and if requested, dedicated – copy of Emergency, a £3 Voucher OR a Free Livestream Ticket.

Please note that vouchers can be used on any item in the bookshop and on our website – including books by featured authors. Please consider supporting the bookshop by purchasing a book or voucher.