"The Wilderness arrives like a miracle. These women, these friends - in their grief and loss, their dedication and their communion - are so achingly real it's hard to let them go. A book of ideas, gorgeously written with clear-sighted vision by one of the wisest, most talented authors working today. Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness is a book to get lost in." -Justin Torres, author of Blackouts, winner of the National Book Award

Flournoy is singular in how she renders the complicated solidarity that exists between friends. In The Wilderness, there is deep tenderness, room for the grayer areas of experience, for contradiction, ambivalence and the right to be lost.” -Raven Leilani, author of Luster 

COMING SEPT 2025

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 "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

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.

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 life.