New Wilderness

“Timeless. . . .a brutal, beguiling fairy tale. . . .At its core, [the novel] is . . .about motherhood, and about the world we make (or unmake) for our children.” — Washington Post

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die.

There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another.

But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways.

At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.

“Gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive in both the best and worst ways. Loved this.” — Roxane Gay via Twitter

“Could this be the great climate change novel of our time? Buzz is building fast for the epic debut novel of Diane Cook.” — Entertainment Weekly