The New Wilderness: A Novel

Diane Cook

Aug 2020 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

A Washington Post, NPR, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“More than timely, the novel feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced — a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity. But at its core, The New Wilderness is really about motherhood, and about the world we make (or unmake) for our children.” — Washington Post

"5 of 5 stars. 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

Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. 

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.

Ratings and reviews

This isn't a story about rewilding. If it was intended as such, it failed. Perhaps it's a story about complicated mother-daughter relationships, well, okay, but there's no resolution and it only gets worse and weirder toward the end. It's hard to like a book when you can't feel any emotion for the characters. With one possible exception, and that only near the end, the characters, both individually and as a collective weren't likable. A good story doesn''t need a happy ending to be good. But it should make you feel something or make you think. This one doesn't. I wish I hadn't bought it, but what's done is done. I also wish I had quit about a third of the way in, but I went to the end.

So beautifully written. I was hooked and devoured this novel until I finished it. Melancholic, metaphoric, with blooming characters and a harsh beauty that'd hard to capture. You must read this.

About the author

Diane Cook is the author of the novel, THE NEW WILDERNESS, which was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection, MAN V. NATURE, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, The Pen/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, daughter and son.