Lonely Crowds
A Novel
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
TIME's 100 Must Read Books of 2025 | Vulture's Best Books of 2025 | New York Magazine's Best Books of the Year
Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wambugu debuts with a resonant coming-of-age novel about the complicated interplay between friendship and artistic ambition. Growing up in Pawtucket, R.I., Ruth and Maria are two of the only Black girls at their Catholic school. Ruth, the daughter of emotionally distant Kenyan immigrants, is immediately drawn to Maria, whose beauty and charisma glimmer despite her troubled home life: "I was struck by two things: her dirtiness and her tremendous confidence." Throughout their school years, Ruth clings to Maria's coattails, eventually following her to Bard College, where they study art and plot how they'll become famous—Ruth as a painter and Maria as a filmmaker. After graduation, they both move to New York City, where Maria finds success, while Ruth struggles with self-doubt about whether she can ever become an artist and jealousy toward the increasingly distant and manipulative Maria. An older, more established Ruth recalls these youthful experiences, and her first-person narration is suitably reflective and, at times, regretful and even melancholy. It's an understated portrait of an artist learning how to come into her own.
