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The Wilderness: A Novel by Angela Flournoy

$30.00

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

Named a most anticipated book by New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, Boston Globe, New York magazine, People magazine, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Hub

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, Danielle, 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 and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, 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.

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

Named a most anticipated book by New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, Boston Globe, New York magazine, People magazine, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Hub

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, Danielle, 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 and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Wilderness. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.

Flournoy has received fellowships from the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.

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