Aug
21
1:30am
Skylit: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook, with Jane Marie
By Skylight Books
The New Wilderness (Harper)
*Order your copy*
"The New Wilderness is a virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure."
—Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven
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.
Diane Cook's fiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, One Story, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.
Jane Marie is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist who produced This American Life for nearly a decade before becoming an independent content creator. She is the host of the Little Everywhere & Stitcher original documentary podcast The Dream and the official Tinder podcast by Gimlet Creative, DTR. As a writer, Jane served as an editor for Jezebel and The Hairpin, penned columns for various sites including The Toast and Cosmopolitan and collaborated with outlets including Epic Magazine, Earwolf and PBS. She lives in LA with her daughter, Goldie.
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