Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. He needed the Exclusion Zone to be an exemplary landscape through which humans might glimpse hope to “make amends” and to “once again become a species in balance with nature.

I felt a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him. So, Emergency is a digressive novel which tells different stories about many characters (human and nonhuman), but each story takes off from a physical meeting.The book, as the title suggests, is not only the story of the Atlantic slave ships but also the story of their widening wake: how the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade have lasted and changed shape with time, creating new forms of dispossession and bodily danger, “the common conditions of Black being in the wake.

Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around – this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust.He describes the bombing raid as a physical event—its sounds, fires, and the waves of pressure—and as with Sharpe’s account, the piecemeal simplicity of this history is oddly unsettling. Lying in bed, Vasya described to his wife how the roof of the power plant had been covered in burning bitumen: it was “like walking on hot tar. Its disturbing simplicity passes from documentary to something else, like the slow footage of the whale fall. 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.

There are many ways of being in this world, human as well as other-than-human, that haven’t been captured or cared for much in my culture’s narratives, and there’s also a powerful – and interesting – fear of allowing these outsider experiences into our stories. This mode of attention is not an encounter between “event and sense,” but “an encounter with something that is both present and absent,” a tool for listening to silence. Still, the narrator’s lips are taut against ready-to-bare teeth – she has an unwavering commitment to expanding the realities of life on earth and the complicated relationship between man and nature.So I hope that within and beyond my novel, whether it’s the contents of the novel or just the feeling of busyness and liveliness, that’s what people feel and think about. Do you have a way of explaining it to yourself – or habits that you’re changing – or do you just try not to think about it? 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. Her second novel Emergency discuss the relationships between people and ecosystems in the wake of the climate crisis – through a surprising setting of 1990s rural Yorkshire. HW: There is so much more I want to talk to you about, but I’ll close with this: what’s next for you?