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Title details for The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy - Wait list

The Wilderness

ebook
Pre-release: Expected September 16, 2025
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: Not available
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: Not available

"Wonderfully ambitious.... 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

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.

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  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2025

      In her long-awaited sophomore novel after the National Book Award finalist The Turner House, Flournoy explores the friendship of five women across 25 years, from young adulthood to midlife. With a 250K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from July 1, 2025
      A web of friendship among millennial Black women stretches across several decades. Desiree, Nakia, January, and Monique grew up together. They haven't all known each other since childhood, but they came into adulthood together, navigating the tumult of their 20s, 30s, and 40s. At the opening of Flournoy's novel--the first since her acclaimed debut, The Turner House (2015)--Desiree is 22. The year is 2008 and she's traveling to Zurich via Paris with her grandfather, who plans to die the next day through assisted suicide. Her grandfather is all the family she has; her mother is long dead, her father long absent, and her relationship with her older sister, Danielle, deeply strained. She feels herself adrift and without prospects, but as it turns out, Desiree's destiny is, in large part, as the anchor of her friend group. Flournoy toggles back and forth in time and perspective across the women, a structure that makes the book feel more like linked stories than a novel with a typical narrative throughline. This enables each woman to be deeply, prismatically rendered: Monique is a librarian-turned-influencer; January is a melancholic mother of two sons; Nakia is a lesbian restaurateur. (Desiree's sister, Danielle, receives a narrative interlude, as well.) They endure hookups and breakups, Covid-19, financial woes, careers, caregiving--"the wilderness of adult life." It's easy to marvel at Flournoy's precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it's the book's hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth. By setting select scenes--including the novel's shattering climax--in the near future, Flournoy seems to warn that the violence and oppression characteristic of 21st-century American life can be mitigated only by community, care, and the families we choose. Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Languages

  • English

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