The Emergency A Novel

"Gripping and profound."
-David Brooks, The New York Times

"Every once in a while, a good dystopian novel strikes the perfect balance . . . The Emergency is one of these novels. What Packer is trying to tell us about our world is neither too obvious nor too ambiguous . . . [Packer] approaches all of his characters with empathy, showing readers where we can do better . . . A well-wrought, colorful and interesting story which asks us urgently to spend time with these questions and figure them out for ourselves-before it's too late."
-Claire Rock, The Michigan Daily

"A propulsive Orwellian novel . . . 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."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In this pivot to fiction, Packer is still preoccupied with the end of empire; it's just that here he imagines a richly detailed adventure for a father and daughter through the jagged remnants of a society that's already crumbled."
-Bloomberg

"George Packer's robustly imagined political parable is at once a gripping adventure and a vivid portrait of a family riven by a changing world. The Emergency is moving, urgent-and indelible."
-Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies

Praise for George Packer

"Packer's strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to marshal a diverse range of voices from across the class divide, in a nation deeply divided by social status."
-J. P. O'Malley, NPR

"Packer's gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term."
-Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Packer's is an American voice of exceptional clarity and humanity . . . When our descendants survey the ruins of this modern imperium and sift its cultural detritus, American voices like this will be the tiny treasures that endure."
-David Goldblatt, The Independent

"Packer's courage [is] the closest we have to Orwell's."
-Charles Kaiser, The Guardian