Emergency

Plot takes a back seat to poignant vignettes of country life in this discursive novel from Hildyard (Hunters in the Snow). While in lockdown during Covid, the unnamed narrator remembers her youth in Yorkshire at the end of the 20th century in flowing if disjointed scenes. The daughter of marginally employed academics, she recalls a fierce friendship with an older girl named Clare, the shifting fortunes of the town’s quarry, and bucolic scenes of patiently observing nature. Alice, an older neighbor the children call a witch (“with an instinct for victimizing difference”) leaves treats for a three-footed deer. The school gets its first computer and a teacher calls attention to ecological threats. Clare, now in a higher grade, becomes a conversational fixation for the children after her cancer diagnosis and another girl’s family moves to Australia only to suddenly return. Hildyard evokes her narrator’s nostalgia without idealizing the past, presenting the violence of nature and the town’s economic struggles through a child’s perception. The narrator, who is “still waiting for things to stop beginning,” seems to both long for her simpler childhood and recognize the confusing pains and tumult of childhood. It’s a gorgeous novel of a youth spent on the cusp of societal upheaval. (Aug.)