DH: Covid exposed interconnectivity to many people in new ways, or changed interconnectivity from something known, in an academic way, to something that was actually (and often cruelly) apparent or felt. Lyudmila followed Vasya there, concealing her pregnancy from his medical team so they would permit her to visit him. So I like words and I think they’re usable within and beyond the human world, but the particular ways in which they filter and prioritize are a concern, yes, very much. A story that extends through the human and the other-than-human, across astronomical and submicroscopic scales, is a story with a widened sense of world.

Inside, instead of wallpaper or dangling wires, there was one globe-shaped hollow lined with fluff and leaf mould, and passages leading from it which all ran through the roots of the turf, with one exception: the long tunnel which dropped down into the earth, then turned at an angle, in a stretched V-shape, and began to rise again. Inside the silence, he says, we “hear our displacement from the position of auditor: as species we hear what our environment hears—and, in listening for silences in that environment, we hear our own displaced position as auditors within the Anthropocene. I wanted to make a modest, preliminary attempt to tell some stories that explore the realities of slow violence, how it moves on unhuman scales and what happens to people as they receive and feel it in their lives. There is something dissociative about a description of war as chains of interactions between beings and forces, rather than as the exclusively human story of nations and disagreements. In theory, Sharpe’s composed, precise narrative of the disintegration of these people—drowning as an ecological phenomenon—could have the effect of naturalizing the atrocities it recounts.The chorus notices how wildlife responds to the disaster, and then how human bodies were poisoned, and then how animals were treated, and then what happened to the landscape, and then, over time, the lingering sicknesses and the effects of death and grief. It’s still unusual for an author who is writing on slavery to pay attention to the residence time of sodium in the ocean.

Emergency is a book to be relished, its precise, subtle prose devoid of romanticism yet passionate in its own way. Is this your experience of the world, too, not just your narrator’s, and is this book partly an effort to hold onto that richness of experience in the natural world? Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency is a pastoral novel for the age of dissolving boundaries…The slowness and gentleness of the text, its pace and its language, make you consider its title.The young girl’s need to love and protect a baby bird or animal and the need to manipulate or hurt it are collapsed together. In plain, factual prose, the doctor recorded experiences in Hiroshima during and after the explosion of the American nuclear bomb. As a collective, these voices create a natural history of destruction that takes in more than any individual would ever be able to witness. Frame by frame, the film shows only what was present: a series of apparently simple organisms, busy with their ordinary metabolic processes.