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THE NEW WILDERNESS

Diane Cook

Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City - an over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives - is destroying her lungs. But what can Bea do? No one leaves the City anymore, because there is nowhere else to go. But across the country lies the Wilderness State, the last swath of open, protected land left. Here forests and desert plains are inhabited solely by wildlife. People are forbidden. Until now.

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace. As the group slowly learns to live and survive on the unpredictable and often dangerous land, its members battle for power and control and betray and save each other. The farther they roam, the closer they come to their animal soul.

To her dismay, Bea discovers that, in fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes, she is losing her in a different way. Agnes is growing wilder and closer to the land, while Bea cannot shake her urban past. As she and Agnes grow further apart, the bonds between mother and daughter are tested in surprising and heartbreaking ways.

Yet just as these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, its future is threatened when the Government discovers a new use for the land. Now the migrants must choose to stay and fight for their place in the wilderness, their home, or trust the Rangers and their promises of a better tomorrow elsewhere.

Diane Cook is the author of the novel, THE NEW WILDERNESS, and the story collection, MAN V. NATURE, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum 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, New York.

A Seth Fishman Book for the Gernert Company.

DIE NEUE WILDNIS
Deutsch von Astrid Finke
[PB Heyne 05/2022]
Available products
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Published 2020-08-01 by Ecco Press

Comments

[...] wry, speculative debut novel. . .Cook's unsettling, darkly humorous tale explores maternal love and man's disdain for nature with impressive results. --Publishers Weekly, starred review

The New Wilderness left me as stunned as a deer in headlights. Gut-wrenching and heart-wrecking, this is a book that demands to be read, and urgently. With beauty and compassion, Diane Cook writes about the precariousness of life on this planet, about the things that make us human - foremost the love between mothers and daughters, at once complex and elemental. Cook observes humanity as a zoologist might - seeing us exactly as the strange animals we really are. -- Rachel Khong, author of GOODBYE, VITAMIN

UK: Oneworld; Russia Eksmo;

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. Read more...

In her gripping and provoking debut novel, Cook extends the shrewd and implacable dramatization of our catastrophic assault on the biosphere that she so boldly launched in her short story collection, Man v. Nature (2014). ... Violence, death, tribalism, lust, love, betrayals, wonder, genius, and courage—all are enacted in this stunningly incisive and complexly suspenseful tale akin to dystopian novels by Margaret Atwood and Claire Vaye Watkins. -- Booklist, starred review

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The New Wilderness is a virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure. -- Emily St. John Mandel, author The New Wilderness left me as stunned as a deer in headlights. Gut-wrenching and heart-wrecking, this is a book that demands to be read, and urgently. With beauty and compassion, Diane Cook writes about the precariousness of life on this planet, about the things that make us human - foremost the love between mothers and daughters, at once complex and elemental. Cook observes humanity as a zoologist might - seeing us exactly as the strange animals we really are.--Rachel Khong, author of GOODBYE, VITAMIN Diane Cook upends old tropes of autonomy, survival, and civilization to reveal startling new life teeming beneath, giving a glimpse into the ways the world we think we know could come unstuck and come to life in the care of the women and girls of the future. This is not just a thrilling, curious, vibrant book--but an essential one, a compass to guide us into the future. -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE

Deadline announced the film/tv deal with Warner Bros TV. Diane Cook will be an executive producer and write the pilot episode. Carly Wray (Watchmen, Westworld) will be an executive producer. Read more...

[...] Cook's is a fresh and vivid voice; it's unsurprising the likes of Miranda July and Roxane Gay are fans. -- The Observer

Diane Cook upends old tropes of autonomy, survival, and civilization to reveal startling new life teeming beneath, giving a glimpse into the ways the world we think we know could come unstuck and come to life in the care of the women and girls of the future. This is not just a thrilling, curious, vibrant book--but an essential one, a compass to guide us into the future. -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of YOU TOO CAN HAVE A BODY LIKE MINE

Cook writes about desperate people in a world of ever shrinking livable space and increasingly questionable resources like air and water but also about the resilience of children who adapt, even enjoying circumstances that overwhelm the adults around them. Cook also raises uncomfortable questions: How far will a person go to survive, and what sacrifices will she or won't she make for those she loves?This ecological horror story (particularly horrifying now) explores painful regions of the human heart. -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Film/tv rights sold to Warner Bros.