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.

The New Wilderness is an embarrassment. We universally disliked this novel, and we had many reasons to do so. First, and most importantly, the world makes no sense. The core premise of the book is that the world is falling apart due to a climate crisis, but that crisis is most ill-defined and when we do get details about the issues, they make no sense. Are there actually supposed to only be five trees in the city? And that then people decided to blow them up? Why is milk so expensive when the whole world is factory farmed? Is the issue overpopulation, because that's not an actual issue that would threaten the world this way. It's like Cook didn't really think through the crisis at the heart of the book -- she just needed a reason to have a bad City and a good Wilderness, and didn't bother to think it through any further than that. Similarly inconsistencies run through everything in the book. Why do the Rangers policies change? What is the Administration they talk about, and why does it make the commands it does? None of this ever gets filled in and it all seems just random. On top of this, the setting doesn't make any sense. The characters are in the wilderness to be part of a study on natural living, but the study also doesn't make sense. Why do the people have to keep moving all the time? No human life ever lived that way. Why is the relationship between the Community and the Rangers so fraught when the guy who invented the study is part of the Community? This might have been forgivable if the character relationships were strong, but that didn't make sense either. This begins in the first few pages of the novel when one of the fifteen or so members of the Community dies in an accident in a river. No one mourns. The narrator thinks the only reason people are upset is because a good rope was lost. This simply does not make sense. There is just no way that a Community of 15 people who have only had each other for 3 years don't feel loss when they lose a member. And this extends to all the relationships Cook describes. The central relationship is between Bea and her daughter Agnes is troubled by Bea's own bizarre reactions and decisions -- sleeping with people she hates, abandoning those she loves, and generally messing up her daughter's life. We felt that maybe if Cook had concentrated just on Agnes's story, there could have been a good story here -- one in which Agnes, blinded by her limited worldview and lack of information -- ponders why her mother is so unreliable and learn why all the stories she's been told about the City and the Wilderness don't make sense. It is not a good thing to say about a story that it would be better if it acknowledged how nonsensical it is. Thoughout the book, we just found time and time again Cook had not thought through what she was writing about, and made an insultingly stupid book of nonsense. Yes, Cook had pretty sentences. Yes, Agnes has some interesting scenes and observations. But a book whose world and political and social settings make no sense is just plain bad. Man Booker, we have no idea why you chose to honor The New Wilderness. 2020 was a hard year with COVID, but get your shit together. We rely on you.