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Fitzcarraldo Editions is to publish Daisy Hildyard's "extraordinary" second novel Emergency next spring.
Publisher Jacques Testard acquired world rights to the novel from David Godwin. "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," the publisher said.
The synopsis states: "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."
The novel further explores some of the ideas in fiction that Hildyard wrote about in her essay "The Second Body", published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. Her debut novel, Hunters in the Snow, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2013 and received the Somerset Maugham Award.
Testard said: "Daisy is a remarkable and highly original writer whose first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Second Body, occupies a singular position on our list, having inspired two exhibitions, a theatre group and an album. This new novel, Emergency, explores some of the ideas she first developed in that book. It is an extraordinary and peculiar achievement, subtly pushing the boundaries of the novel form, and showing us what fiction in the anthropocene can be."