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A Novel
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.
"The Wilderness arrives like a miracle. Here is the novel I'm always waiting for, one which captures and explains and deepens the world around me. These women, these friends — in their grief and loss, their dedication and their communion — are so achingly real it's hard to let them go. A book of ideas, gorgeously written with clear-sighted vision by one of the wisest, most talented authors working today. Angela Flournoy's The Wilderness is a book to get lost in." —Justin Torres, author of Blackouts, winner of the National Book Award
"The Wilderness is a wonderfully ambitious novel that follows five women throughout decades of friendship, as they struggle to find purpose and belonging in their rapidly-gentrifying cities. Weaving through time, Angela Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book." —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers
"Angela Flournoy is singular in how she renders the complicated solidarity that exists between friends. In The Wilderness, there is deep tenderness, room for the grayer areas of experience, for contradiction, ambivalence and the right to be lost." —Raven Leilani, author of Luster
This information about The Wilderness was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: LaToya T. Duncan
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which is a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.
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