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The Wilderness
An era-defing novel about four women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they transition from young adults to grown women. 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, as the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's struggling with her surprise pregnancy and her relationship with a ‘good’ man she feels ambivalent about. 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 often 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, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern life. Angela Flournoy's The Wilderness is a masterful and kaleidoscopic novel, capturing with disarming wit and electric prose how the most profound connections often lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.