Wilderness

ANGELA FLOURNOY is a novelist and essayist who lives in New York. Her new novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize in the United States. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and announced her as a major new literary talent. Her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University and UCLA. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.

Nothing in this exaltingly intelligent novel adheres to our expectations... The book is exquisite in its style and control. Most chapters happen over a few hours, but, in flashbacks, encapsulate lifetimes. Flournoy's use of close third-person to relay each character's perspective is masterful; you never doubt whose head you are in. Moreover, the stream-of-consciousness, while beautifully worded, never gets carried away by lyricism, rooted as it is in the material world... Flournoy has been compared to Toni Morrison, but there's a touch of Virginia Woolf as well