The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

In 2008, 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 transition 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 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.

‘Flournoy is singular.’ Raven Leilani

‘Wonderfully ambitious… A voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating.’ Brit Bennett

‘Flournoy has a long-lens talent, capable of spanning great distances while keeping her characters in crisp, but always compassionate, focus.’ Eleanor Catton

‘Gorgeously written with clear-sighted vision by one of the wisest, most talented authors working today.’ Justin Torres

‘Takes twenty-first-century black womanhood on a wild ride, and just keeps getting wilder. A triumphant whirlwind of a novel.’ Namwali Serpell

‘Inhabits a quartet of shifting perspectives with wit, tenderness and exquisite grace… Flournoy’s account of the emotional vicissitudes of friendship and its endurance evokes the hushed, disconsolate quality of [Toni] Morrison.’ New York Times

‘A future classic.’ Harper’s Bazaar

An era-defining novel about Black womanhood and urban American life following four women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, from young adulthood to midlife, through Obama’s presidency to Trump’s second term, by two-time National Book Award longlistee Angela Flournoy….

About the Author:

Angela Flournoy is a novelist and essayist who lives in New York. Her new novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize in the United States. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and announced her as a major new literary talent. 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 UCLA. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 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.

21 Apr 2026
 

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy ISBN 9780857309525