Later, Soviet authorities sent marksmen into the Exclusion Zone to dispose of the contaminated domestic animals who remained. They moved digressively, from one subject to another, via associations in the author-narrator’s memory or consciousness. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid.

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. Breaking apart well-worn tropes, Emergency provides an unaffectedly complicated picture of our shared environment, exposing the gaps in the lockdown narrative that ‘nature is healing’.Each author is clear about this: their story is not consigned to the past; it unfolds in the reader’s presence. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era. I think that sometimes giving up and slowing down is really fun – and really good for everything and everybody.

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. His autobiography states that he was witness to a “devastation … greater than anything I had ever seen. Rachel Carson shared a similar thought when she invoked a decimated ecosystem with the title Silent Spring. Its disturbing simplicity passes from documentary to something else, like the slow footage of the whale fall. 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?Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, a study of the historical legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, refers in passing to marine scientists’ studies of whale fall. I think she finds it really hard to look at this stuff every day and then kind of… close the laptop and, you know, go and see mates or something, and it’s just a weird experience of being in the world that I think connects with a lot of us.