Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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On the banks of the stream we encounter a solitary young man who has run away from the army and is hiding in the woods in a nylon tent.

HW: In all of your writing you explore themes of our boundaries with the natural world, with time and space and the particular forms of matter. Sharpe asks herself, How does one account for “surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat?Perhaps this was why he found himself struggling to uncover the simple facts about their experiences. This is not a book about Chernobyl as a localized geography, but a book “on the world of Chernobyl,” in the sense that the physical effects of the disaster have extended across the planet, altering the experience of time and space. And then the more I think about the fact that I don’t particularly like the dairy or meat industries, the more I find it harder to justify those practices. Not only in this sort of nature – scenes of cows and trees in a landscape – but also inside my flat or whatever.

These studies show that within a few days the whales’ bodies are picked almost clean by benthic organisms—those organisms that live on the seafloor. During the last two days of Vasya’s life, Lyudmila said, she’d “lift his arm and the bone would be all wobbly, hanging loose, the tissue hanging out. Over days, weeks, months, then years, the camera closed in on the minuscule zombie worms who entered these bones, injecting acid to tunnel down and extract traces of fat. Even the faults of language and the volatility of trying to put things into words are flaws to appreciate – I think – in a culture that has a scary love of perfection. It can take decades for this process to crumble the fragmented bones into particles and disperse them into other forms until the entire whale has been transubstantiated.

She invites her marine geologist colleague to explain the ecological legacy of these drowned bodies.

Each author is clear about this: their story is not consigned to the past; it unfolds in the reader’s presence. But every piece of information he gathered was driving towards a single purpose: to use this knowledge to maximize the efficacy of Allied bombing campaigns, which is to say, to raze more buildings and kill more people. Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2013, and has been hailed as ‘a remarkably intelligent debut’, a ‘truly dazzling first novel’, and as a book ‘so rich in texture it deserves many re-readings’.

Rich and unflinching, this writing expands our sense of what it means to live, as we do, in a time of crisis. Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. One contemporary author noted that the date of a building’s destruction could be inferred from the maturity and diversity of the weeds, flowers, and trees growing through its ruins. Over a decade ago, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote an influential essay on how climate change affects historical narrative, and his first premise is that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.