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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.
Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award 2026
Here is an interesting award recognizing distinguished fiction that tells American stories in a uniquely American voice, one that reflects Mark Twain's incisive curiosity and humanity. Celebrating its tenth year. Longlist 2026 Are You Happy?: Stories — Lori Ostlund Atavists: Stories — Lydia Mille...
-Anne_Glasgow
"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)
"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." ―The Michigan Daily
"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
This information about The Emergency was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Guillermo Riveros
George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His 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.
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