The Wilderness

A Novel

De: Angela Flournoy

Narrado por: Angela Flournoy, Aja Naomi King, Ashley Nicole Black

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

"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 2000s into the late 2020s, 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.

©2025 Angela Flournoy (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Wow. Brilliantly crafted.

It’s not an exaggeration to say I hung on every single word. I savored the glimpses of humanity that are so familiar and, at the same time, I don’t remember ever having read before. The build toward the ending was masterful. I listened to the last two chapters with the same piece of laundry in my hands, jaw gaping, eyes on the middle distance and tears on my face. What a gift this novel is to the world.

All the characters were unlikeable

None of the lead characters were likeable, the story dragged out, and the ending made absolutely no sense. Was really looking forward to enjoying this book and ended up very disappointed.