The Wilderness
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
Named one of the Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year"
Named a Best of the Year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Vogue, Elle, Time, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, Town & Country, NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Book Riot, Audible
"Flournoy has delivered a future classic—the kind of novel that generations to come will read to understand the nuances and peculiarities of this time." — Harper's Bazaar
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.
Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.
Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.
As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.
The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The friendship between four Black millennial women sustains them across two decades in the second novel from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy. Desiree is 22 and deeply feeling her estrangement from her sister, Danielle, as the novel opens in 2008. Soon we meet her friends: librarian-turned-blogger Monique, aspiring restaurateur Nakia, and frustrated mom January. Through vignettes that jump around in time, we get a prismatic view of these women and their ever-shifting desires as they grow from their twenties in the 2000s to their forties in the 2020s. Flournoy drew us into their compelling struggles to navigate their careers, families, and most of all, their fierce bonds of friendship. And she brings race and class into the conversation, nimbly addressing the women’s social and political realities with powerful subtlety and insight. If you love a story about women showing up for each other, The Wilderness will not disappoint.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stimulating sophomore effort from National Book Award finalist Flournoy (The Turner House) follows five Black women over two decades of soul-searching and turmoil. The nonlinear narrative begins in 2008 with Desiree, a young waitress in Los Angeles, feeling unmoored after the death of her grandfather, who raised her along with her sister, Danielle, from whom she's estranged. Seeking a fresh start, Desiree moves to Manhattan a few years later. There, she stays with her wealthy childhood friend Nakia, a restaurant manager, and considers reconciling with Danielle. The pair's other friend, influencer and graphic designer January, who is pregnant, contemplates asking the father, her first and only partner, to relinquish his rights to their child so she can explore what else life has to offer. In 2019, university librarian Monique, another member of the friend group, blogs about her school's unwillingness to acknowledge its historical role in the slave trade. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Nakia generously supports her staff but doesn't make a show of virtue signaling ("She didn't aspire to be known as good—she loved Monique but had no desire to become an Internet Person"), all the while wondering how she might find fulfillment. Flournoy's pages radiate with intelligence as her characters attempt to shape their lives on their own terms. It's a knockout.
