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 Named a Best of the Year by The New Yorker 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.
