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The Wilderness: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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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“The kind of novel that generations to come will read to understand the nuances and peculiarities of this time.”
— Harper’s Bazaar
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“A ruminating, clear-eyed look at friendship as a means of survival.”
— Boston Globe -
“The Wilderness treats friendship with the dignity and fascination it deserves.”
— Washington Post
Awards
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A September 2025 LibraryReads Pick
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Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
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Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award
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Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize
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A Washington Post Top 10 Book of 2025
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A New Yorker Best Books of the Year Pick
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A Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year
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A Town & Country Magazine Pick of 2025's Best Books
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A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best
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A Time Magazine Book of the Year
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An Elle Magazine Pick of Best Books of 2025
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About Angela Flournoy
Angela Flournoy’s fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and she has written for the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.
About Angela Flournoy
Saskia Maarleveld is an experienced voice-over actress and Earphones Award–winning narrator. Raised in New Zealand and France, she is highly skilled with accents and dialects, and many of her books have been narrated entirely in accents other than her own. In addition to audiobooks, her voice can be heard in animation, video games, and commercials.