Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Friendship, womanhood and ageing gracefully collide in a new novel from Angela Flournoy, which will hit the shelves on September 16.
The Wilderness tackles five black women – Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia – over the course of their 20-year friendship as they navigate life between young adulthood and middle-age.
Sisters Desiree and Danielle tackle bitter family wounds, January feels ambivalent about her relationship with a ‘good’ man, librarian and aspiring blogger Monique unexpectedly rises to fame after calling out the university where she works for whitewashing fraught history, and Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground without relying on her upper middle-class family.
“The Wilderness is a kind of coming-into-middle-age novel, and I consider that journey, from young adult to a person navigating their 40s, to be just as full of mystery, self-discovery, and conflict as the one portrayed in a traditional bildungsroman,” the author explained in an interview.
“There are many road maps a young person might follow to come into their own as a teenager, but the paths are less clear for people leaving young adulthood, as what once felt certain begins to feel less so. I had an inkling of this, and I wrote into my own curiosities.”
A bildungsroman is a novel that deals with a person’s formative years.
Angela published her debut novel The Turner House in 2015, which was positively received by critics and readers. It was named a New York Times notable book of that year. It also won the First Novelist Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, among many other accolades.
