The Emergency - by George Packer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

George Packer's gripping fable of imperial collapse illuminates the crises of our times.

George Packer's bestselling nonfiction work exploring American life has won many prizes, including the National Book Award. With The Emergency, he turns to fiction, bringing us a visionary novel that goes to the nerve center of what it means to live in a time of fracture and upheaval.

An empire has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. In the Emergency that follows, youth rebellions of urban Burghers and rural Yeomen embrace radical new ideas of humanity. Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family--from his wife, Annabelle, who finds fulfillment in their changed community; and especially from his teenage daughter, Selva, who has turned against her father's values. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin's disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.

The Emergency is a novel of ideas and a taut page-turner. It asks what we owe each other across divided generations and classes--what common human bonds remain when a society falls apart. In creating a vividly imagined world, Packer takes us deep into the heart of our troubled moment.

Review Quotes

"Every once in a while, a good dystopian novel strikes the perfect balance . . . The Emergency is one of these novels. What Packer is trying to tell us about our world is neither too obvious nor too ambiguous . . . [Packer] approaches all of his characters with empathy, showing readers where we can do better . . . A well-wrought, colorful and interesting story which asks us urgently to spend time with these questions and figure them out for ourselves--before it's too late."
--Claire Rock, The Michigan Daily

"A propulsive Orwellian novel . . . Packer writes with spare elegance and mounting urgency, and while the depictions of rising class and intergenerational conflicts have clear parallels to real-world matters, the novel never loses its taut dramatic edge. It's a knockout."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In this pivot to fiction, Packer is still preoccupied with the end of empire; it's just that here he imagines a richly detailed adventure for a father and daughter through the jagged remnants of a society that's already crumbled." --Bloomberg

"George Packer's robustly imagined political parable is at once a gripping adventure and a vivid portrait of a family riven by a changing world. The Emergency is moving, urgent--and indelible." --Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies

Praise for George Packer

"Packer's strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to marshal a diverse range of voices from across the class divide, in a nation deeply divided by social status." --J.P. O'Malley, NPR

"Packer's gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Packer's is an American voice of exceptional clarity and humanity . . . When our descendants survey the ruins of this modern imperium and sift its cultural detritus, American voices like this will be the tiny treasures that endure." -- David Goldblatt, The Independent

"Packer's courage [is] the closest we have to Orwell's." --Charles Kaiser, The Guardian

About the Author

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.