21/04/2022
Pay attention! For the drama of Emergency teeters there, with the reader, and our decision whether or not to engage, to act. In the end it’s up to us. For the call to attend to this world housed within the pages of a book is surely a call to attend to the larger world, a warning to be heeded as flames silently lick the final pages, “pressuring anything living to get out of there.”
— Daisy Hildyard’s “Emergency” blends a child’s intent observations of her native Yorkshire with her adult self’s musings on life in coronavirus quarantine:
“I was raised in rural Yorkshire … I still have a deep feeling, which dates from my childhood, that you shouldn’t waste anything, especially words”—the matter-of-fact tone set by this phrase from Daisy Hildyard’s previous Fitzcarraldo-published book, The Second Body , glides, ...