The Emergency

Packer, a journalist and winner of the National Book Award for The Unwinding, delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world known as “the empire.” The story’s beleaguered hero, Dr. Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at a hospital in the empire’s unnamed capital city, initially brushes off the Emergency, which begins when the city’s ruling elite flees and teenage looters take to the streets. “These things never last,” Hugo reassures his wife and their two children. “We’ll go about our normal lives.” But the empire collapses and after Rustin’s misstep during a surgery leads to his suspension from the hospital, he’s forced to confront the new order taking shape. In the vacuum left by the empire rises an egalitarian youth movement called Together, which elevates the formerly disenfranchised Excess Burghers, who scored too poorly on their exams to join a guild, and romanticizes a nomadic minority group called the Strangers. Tensions escalate between the Burghers, the urban middle class the Rustins belong to, and the less educated rural Yeomen who farm outside the city walls. Rustin, feeling adrift in a world that no longer values experience, embarks on a “humanitarian mission” to treat an ailing Stranger boy. At the last minute, his 14-year-old daughter insists on joining him, triggering a chain of events that will leave irreparable damage. 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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)