Angela Flournoy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION "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, 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.

A Novel

The Wilderness

Lindsay

What if she got everything she wanted and it was still no easier to start her day? What if her throat still caught when she introduced herself? The WORST: she might never attain what her mother, long-divorced in Inglewood and refusing to retire until she found a new husband, had yet to grasp: a true sense of grounding, regardless of circumstance.

The most common emotion she’d begun to feel in their relationship was guilt. Better to be alone, she’d concluded. Better to crawl into some tight space and be still, like a cockroach.

Nothing can depress you quite like suddenly coming into somebody else’s idea of good fortune.

She accuses me of giving in to despair. I didn’t give in to despair. I looked up and despair had already entered the room, made itself at home.

The Wilderness quotes

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