Unfortunately I requested an ebook which I’m unable to read because of my disability and therefore not able to add a review. My apologies.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for letting me review an uncorrected digital copy of this book.

Wow I loved it! I don't want to do any spoilers, but the world building was fantastic, the character building as well. It was beautiful and horrifying, but never grotesque. That's difficult to do with this genre. I found myself stopping and really thinking about what was going on many times. It's that kind of book.

If you liked The Dog Stars, Oryx and Crake, The Parable of the Sower...I think this will be up your alley.

2.75 ⭐️ The Emergency drastically changed the Empire and the lives of Burghers and Yeomen. From now on, the young are in power and they introduced a new order that follows the principles of Together: “Everyone belongs”, “Listen to the young”, “I am no better and neither are you”, and “You shall be as gods”.

We mainly follow the surgeon Hugo Rustin who disapproves of this new order, even though his wife and children are advocates of Together. Especially his daughter Selva seeks comfort and a community in Together. Hugo’s relationship with Selva becomes more complicated. When the two go on a journey, they get a chance apart from any outside influence to reconnect.

The author’s writing style is great and I liked the concept of a fallen Empire and two rebellious groups that take over the city and countryside.
However, I had a hard time getting through this book. I wish the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen had been explained in more detail. Even after finishing this book, I didn’t have the feeling that I understood these two groups—but maybe that was the point?
In addition to that, the new principles of Together didn’t have a shocking effect on me as I usually expect from other dystopian novels when a new order is introduced.
Overall, the story just didn’t hook me, and the main character felt a little flat.

Meticulously written, at its best moments the novel felt like José Saramago’s Blindness or Moshin Hamid’s Exit West. But, for me, much of the time Packer’s satiric/dystopic vision felt a little too on the nose. Life for a family of Brooklynesque “Burgher”-elites is disrupted when already existing divisions along class and geographical lines are exacerbated by totalitarian-leaning wokeism, conspiracy theories, and an influx of climate refugees. The main protagonist’s humanism is put through the ringer but manages to survive. Unfortunately, the insights the characters glean from their experiences are too obvious or shallow to get me thinking anew about present-day politics and society -- which is a shame, given the subtlety and depth of Packer’s absolutely top-notch non-fiction. Still, a quick read with enough portentous foreboding and dramatic tension to pull you through.

We follow Dr. Hugo Rustin, a disgraced surgeon, he has a teenage daughter (Selva), a young son (Pen) and his estranged wife (Annabelle). We accompany them as they navigate life after the collapse of the empire. What was once was the norm is no more. Traditional ways have fallen, and new ideas are beginning to emerge. From all this, conflict erupts between the Burghers and the Yeomen.

Radical ideas and political turmoil. This novel makes us question conformity, societal norms, politics and their role in an ever changing world where power seems more important then human connection. Where assimilation is more important then individuality. At least until its not. What happens after its collapse? How would you survive in a world that is evolving so quickly.

From the beginning you can see just how well written this novel is. The imagery and world creation is up there with some of the best. So vivid it was easy to envision, like a movie playing in your head.

Overall so complex and well done. An amazing read, especially during these turbulent times.

As a dystopian fiction lover, I really enjoyed this book immensely! The plot is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and every conflict explored feels deeply relatable to issues in our own world. If you're looking for a novel that will leave a lasting impression on you and will make you ponder about philosophical and moral questions.. this ones for you!

George Packer’s The Emergency isn’t just a dystopian novel — it’s a mirror of today, the moment we’re living through. The Emergency imagines the aftermath of an empire not destroyed by war or famine, but by inertia — a collapse brought on by collective boredom and disillusionment.

At the center is Doctor Hugo Rustin, a man whose belief in logic, order, and institutional identity has been left behind by a society that no longer values any of it. When a medical scandal pushes him to the margins of his crumbling city, Rustin sets off on a desperate journey through the countryside with his daughter Selva, a teenage revolutionary whose ideals reflect the very upheaval that terrifies him. Their journey becomes a meditation on generational rifts, moral clarity, and the deeply personal cost of public breakdown.

What makes The Emergency so gripping isn’t just its allegorical ambition — though the parallels to our current moment are sharp — but its emotional honesty. Packer doesn’t reduce his characters to symbols. They continue to act out in their personalities no matter what the odyssey brings them.

The worldbuilding is subtle but devastating: a nation of hollow institutions and divided identities, where "progress" is weaponized and then worshipped. Packer refuses easy answers. He’s more interested in what happens when people are forced to reinvent themselves in a landscape where the past is no longer used as a metric.

At times, The Emergency flirts with the philosophical but it’s a page-turner filled with tension and full of urgency. You’ll recognize the world. This is not comfort reading. It’s literature as warning. For anyone wondering where we go when belief dies and who we become when connection is all we have left — The Emergency offers a chilling answer. #theemergency #georgepacker #farrarstraussgiroux

There are books that speculate, and there are books that reflect. The Emergency does both. It reads like a mirror angled just slightly away from our world, revealing not just the surface of society, but the contours beneath—the buried fractures, the fault lines we’d rather not acknowledge. In that way, it’s a novel that feels less like a narrative, and more like an echo chamber for our collective disquiet.

George Packer has long been a chronicler of politics and power, but in The Emergency, he abandons the comforts of journalism and embraces fiction’s messy, metaphorical terrain. The result is a work that resists clean interpretations. At its heart is a father and daughter, locked not just in familial tension, but in an ideological rift that feels eerily contemporary: he is anchored in the rituals of the old world; she leaps—sometimes blindly—toward a new one.

Their conflict is not simply generational. It is epistemological. What is truth? Who decides which traditions are worth preserving, and which ones are scaffolds for oppression? These questions play out not in grand manifestos but in small, human acts—rejections, silences, miscommunications. And that is where Packer’s strength lies. Even while building a world so clearly allegorical, he allows its people to stay stubbornly real.

Yes, there are dystopian tropes—the fraying of democratic order, the seductive call of populism, the young remaking myths into weapons—but Packer handles them with an almost anthropological restraint. The Yeoman aren’t caricatures. The City isn’t a monolith. No side owns virtue or vice, and that ambiguity is the novel’s greatest truth. In a polarized world, The Emergency suggests that clarity is a luxury; complexity is what we must live with.

The novel’s success lies not in predicting the future, but in capturing the present as it slips through our hands. It doesn’t offer comfort. It doesn’t choose sides. What it does—quietly, insistently—is ask whether we are still capable of listening to each other across the noise. And in that, The Emergency feels less like fiction, and more like a test.

4.5 stars

Let me say upfront that some of the best speculative fiction is often written by authors that we don't usually associate with science fiction. Packer proves my suspicion. He has the scholarly chops to offer us an intelligent political allegory. It's not clunky, nor are the characters mere mouthpieces but overall it felt like a philosophy of history set to story. Something, that I personally enjoy. It's prescient. Emergency is captivating in the sense of slowing down for a car wreck. This is my way of warning you that sometimes reading this novel felt a little too close to the mark. So let me ask, do you enjoy reading about people trying to live through Imperial Melancholy--that Ozymandias time of long autumnal shadows when an empire’s best days are well behind her? If so dear reader this is the novel for you.

Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for letting me read this advance copy!

Reading any dystopia and being truly swept away in 2025 is difficult: current affairs have been too influential on our perception of reality. This novel feels dangerously of the moment, and therefore quickly dated, at the start: it seems clear that this world is an echo of current fears of fascism in America and the not yet vanished language of the pandemic. Throughout, there is an Orwellian distrust of group-think and a focus on how tradition, hierarchy, and individualism are necessary parts of a functional society.

The protagonist, a self-professed ‘humanist’ and firmly established member of the ‘elite’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ depending on your preferred period of social upheaval, is unwilling to accept the new social order that has taken over his society:

"'This is unprecedented,' he kept repeating, as if the insight might solve their problem."

His daughter, on the other end of the spectrum, embraces the new order with some naivety, but also desperation. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that she is actually extremely intelligent, but is being wilfully naive as she is searching for some form of meaning or hope that she can be part of to create a world that is better and more just than her father’s. She is searching for moral meaning in the future; he found his purpose in the past and is deeply hurt by her rejection of his identity. As a depiction of generational conflict, their relationship is believable and sweet — both have the power to hurt each other, and do, but are also trying to communicate across the divide.

The plot is very readable; Packer has not forgotten to entertain. The allegorical, storyteller’s tone is reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin — science fiction by the way of reality. At the start, it is so close to reality, it threatens to push the reader out of enjoying the imaginary world, although the plot swiftly picks up pace and draws us into the unique conflicts of this universe.

The conflicts in 'The Emergency' (generational divide, societal malaise, virtue signalling, refugees, class and immigration, xenophobia, the control of social media over the young, the cruelty of meritocracy, the danger of mob rule) are ripped from our headlines, and therefore it would be easy for us to draw parallels between our own beliefs and the events of the novel, casting moral judgements on the author’s choices.

However, this also feels like a fruitless exercise. As one example, the Yeoman, who repeatedly refer to themselves as ‘native’ and are legitimately a colonised people with an uneasy relationship with the ‘City’, are shown to be practical and stereotypically connected to nature. However, their young people also appear to be mini-fascists, or violent thugs, corrupting old myths to suit their own ends. This is not dissimilar to their peers in the city, who are also discovering violence, albeit in a different way. A colonialist reading would be easy — Packer refers to the old regime as an empire to make it even easier — but it is also more complex and human than that. It’s about lack of communication, and fear, and how divide is easily sown between people. Perhaps it is also about how the young can be both dangerous and innocent because of their naivety and desire to make a mark on the world.

Packer deftly weaves together different themes of upheaval and identity, but avoids taking a side. Ultimately, this novel is about what it means to be human in a time of generational change. Meaning, in ‘The Emergency’, is found through making connections and trying to communicate even if you don’t understand: this is what all the characters we are rooting for try to do in their own way, to make the world better.