A mysterious book with a legacy spanning from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day unites three women --- and their secrets --- in this unforgettable novel from New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton.

A mysterious book with a legacy spanning from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day unites three women --- and their secrets --- in this unforgettable novel from New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton.

A mysterious book with a legacy spanning from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day unites three women --- and their secrets --- in this unforgettable novel from New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton.

London, 2024: American expat Margo Reynolds is renowned for her talent at sourcing rare antiques for her clients, but she’s never had a request quite like this one. She’s been hired to find a mysterious book published over a century ago. With a single copy left in existence, it has a storied past shrouded in secrecy --- and her client isn’t the only person determined to procure it at any cost.

Havana, 1966: Librarian Pilar Castillo has devoted her life to books, and in the chaotic days following her husband’s unjust imprisonment by Fidel Castro, reading is her only source of solace. So when a neighbor fleeing Cuba asks her to return a valuable book to its rightful owner, Pilar will risk everything to protect the literary work entrusted to her care. It’s a dangerous mission that reveals to her the power of one book to change a life.

Boston, 1900: For Cuban school teacher and aspiring author Eva Fuentes, traveling from Havana to Harvard to study for the summer is the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s a whirlwind adventure that leaves her little time to write, but a moonlit encounter with an enigmatic stranger changes everything. The story that pours out of her is one of forbidden love, secrets and lies…and though Eva cannot see it yet, the book will be a danger and salvation for the lives it touches.

THE WILDERNESS is an era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their 20-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife.

THE WILDERNESS is an era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their 20-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife.

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their 20-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 20s 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 has 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 2000s into the late 2020s, 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.