The Second Body

‘Part amateur detective, part visionary, Hildyard’s voice is so intelligent, beguiling and important. Like Sir Thomas Browne or even Annie Dillard, her sly variety of scientific inquiry is incandescent.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

‘With a voice that is both intimate and richly imaginative, [Hildyard] draws on sources spanning biology, ecology, literature, and sociology to illustrate the seeming paradox of human existence: that humans act individually and globally at once – that we act both in and on the world around us. ... Hildyard’s book is a powerful exploration of how every human is both a singular being as well as one of many in the world.‘
— Publishers Weekly

‘These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology.’
— Gavin Francis, Guardian

‘“Another creature’s experience is different, and we do not know how it is different”, writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body. This playful and original essay touches on the limits of our ability to imagine that experience. Hildyard, a novelist who was trained as a historian of science, tries to find the ways we intuit boundaries between our bodies and our ecosystems, between ourselves and other animals.‘
— Jennie Erin Smith, Times Literary Supplement

‘In a series of rich, lucid meditations, rooted in conversations with others (butchers, biologists, etc.) and in illuminating readings of literature (Ferrante, Shakespeare, etc.), Hildyard guides the reader through questions about global warming, the illusive boundary between human and animal life, and more. The Second Body is a subtle, original attempt to see humanity more clearly.’
— Nathan Goldman, Lit Hub

‘In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, The Second Body might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard’s book is as contemporary as the morning paper. If ecstasy means to go outside oneself, the word usually carries connotations of chaos and inarticulacy. Here, however, is a precise and eloquent ecstasy – and this slender book about who we are beyond our own skins is likewise much larger than itself.’
— Benjamin Kunkel, author of Utopia or Bust

‘At only 118 pages, The Second Body reads like an extra-lengthy New Yorker article, invoking a similar journalistic rhythm that favors one unbroken reading … the reward for staying with it in a single sitting allows for the true beauty of Hildyard’s project to unfurl like a planet-sized nickelodeon, one that can be appreciated on many levels.’
— Michael Barron, Culture Trip

‘In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard gives a body to an idea in a series of curious encounters that take us from the floor of a butcher shop to the computer room of a biologist to the wreckage of a flooded home. Heady and visceral both, this essay revels in the mess and splendour of the world.’
— Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

‘Daisy Hildyard has turned her curious, sifting, brilliantly original mind onto the pressing ecological questions of our age. The result is a series of essays as captivating as they are delightful, their object no less than to quietly rewire our thinking.’
— Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade

‘Hildyard takes us on a white-knuckle philosophical ride through identity, agency, ecology and molecular biology, leaving us vitally disconcerted, but with a strange new sense of community and solidarity. A curious, oblique, important, and fascinating book.’
— Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

‘Hildyard's writing stretches the mind, pushes you to not just acknowledge but feel the connection between a piece of meat at the butcher's shop and the flight path of a pigeon.’
— Alexandra Kleeman, Buzzfeed

'The real value of Hildyard’s second body approach is in rendering humans natural organisms by making us slightly uncanny. This is achieved in a variety of ways, perhaps most powerfully when Hildyard thinks about the effect of a massive flood of her own home, imagining the ways in which her house has become something for water to fill and creatures to explore. ... The idea of my second body is a useful provocation.'
— B. D. McClay, The Weekly Standard