George Packer Discusses The Emergency with Jennifer Senior
BPL Presents welcomes George Packer, whose gripping fable of imperial collapse—The Emergency—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.
PARTICPANTS
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.
Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer for Feature Writing, and one of the three finalists for the same Pulitzer in 2024. Prior to joining The Atlantic, she spent five years at The New York Times, first as one of its three daily book critics, then as a columnist for the Opinion page. Before that, she spent eighteen years as a staff writer for New York Magazine. Her first book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, was named one of Slate's Top 10 Books of 2014, and has been translated into twelve languages.
