The New Wilderness

Written by Diane Cook

Narrated by Stacey Glemboski

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Aug 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063009127

Diane Cook

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.

Reviews for The New Wilderness

[Brenner Jamie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. Great setting, wonderful character development and so satisfying to hear about human survival in the new wilderness.

[Diamond Rose Crosby · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What can I say?! I don’t have the ability to find the words but the one that comes to mind is: beautiful in the most unexpected way!

[kate clark · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent character development and unique story that never seemed to go where I suspected it would. Wonderful voice actress as reader.

[Kate Normand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I see a lot of reviews that are mainly about this book not giving answers to questions the readers find themselves asking. I understand that frustration. I’ve felt it before with other books and movies. However, those other works I’ve felt like that about… the authors were intentionally trying to build and share a complex dystopian world. A world with a detailed history, with rules and cause and effect. I don’t think that’s what the author wanted to do here at all. I believe the opposite, they’ve been intentional to keep aspects vague and mysterious. Don’t get me wrong, this made me curious. I desperately wanted to know why things were the way they were - especially in the beginning of the book. As I listened, though, I didn’t need or want those kinds of details. For me, this book is of course a story about family. It’s also a story about the psychology of desperation, omission, arrogance and the weird shit humans do when (mostly) everything about modern society is kept separate.
I liked the book. If you enjoy dystopian sci fi that *doesn’t* rely heavily on violence as a plot device, I would recommend it.

[celeste · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating perpesctive and story: kids are getting sick cuz the cities are so polluted to breathe and there is no more rural land. You sign up for a study and take your sick daughter and only the clothes on your back into a wilderness run by unsympathetic park rangers who kind of hate you and run he observation. You are with a rag tag group of people just surviving the winters, natural accidents that claim members of your group. No rest or reprieve from sickness and death. An interesting read that will have you thinking about the plausibility of such a place..

[sidney g · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dystopian isn’t really my thing and honestly if i hadn’t had to read this for class i probably wouldn’t have finished it. Because I was reading for class, i switched between reading the actual book and listening. Listening to this audiobook was much more bearable than reading it! The person speaking it brings it alive and it’s easier to ignore how clunky some bits of the dialogue and prose are. Not binge read worthy but enjoyable as a secondary thing when driving or doing art.

[Jeffrey Longino · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Binged the book on a road trip. Great take on the social aspects of post-societal collapse. The book does a good job of portraying the insignificance of humans, coping with death and the hardships of small communities in nature trying to survive. Only complaint from me is the author says the main characters just left without any knowledge of how to survive because it was a planned event.

[Finola · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found this book to be very intriguing. I don't feel there is any need, as others have expressed a desire for, for the backstory to be explained. I think that would have been an unnecessary addition. The story is very full, the characters engaging, each with their own personality, very well drawn. The concept is entirely believable as something that could happen in the future, not too far from now. I very much enjoyed this book and would love to read another taking the story further stop

[tuusannuuska-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm so confused as to why this is a nominee for the sci-fi Goodreads Award (as this is not what I'd class as sci-fi). I'm glad it is though, because I highly doubt I'd have read this otherwise.

This is a book I went into with very little expectation, which is probably why I liked it so much. The writing is very well done, and the nature setting was so nice.

The story takes place in a world where not much of nature remains, so a selected few have been sent to the last remaining wilderness to see if it's possible for people to co-exist with nature without ruining it.

Above all else though, this is a book about mothers and daughters and how we tend to appreciate the choices of our mothers only in hindsight. It was also done in a way that didn't feel exaggerated or explained to death.

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Diane Cook’s bold dystopian novel, The New Wilderness, posits a dismal future for humanity in a ravaged world. The action, which takes place over several years, follows a group known as the Community as they pursue a nomadic existence in the only patch of untouched wilderness left on the planet. Previously, access to this “Wilderness State” was forbidden. But there’s been a change. The members of the Community, who once lived in the City—a crowded, hostile, toxic, glass-and-concrete environment—have been allowed in, giving up contact with civil society to participate in an experiment intended to study wilderness survival strategies and the impact of human activity on nature. The cast of characters is sizable, but Cook’s novel focuses primarily on Bea and her daughter Agnes. A few years earlier, while still in the City, Agnes, then a toddler, developed severe lung disease because of poor air quality. Believing her daughter was going to die, Bea signed on to the experiment. In the Wilderness, Agnes, around eight when we meet her, has regained her health and is thriving. Cook describes life in the Wilderness in unvarnished, even brutal terms: as the novel begins, Bea has just given birth unaided to a stillborn baby, cradling the tiny corpse briefly before burying it. Cook vividly details the dangers and drudgery of life in the wild and portrays the inevitable power struggles and shifting allegiances among Community members. From time to time, the Community visit a “Post” (there are a number of these in the Wilderness), where they collect mail and receive directions from the Rangers, authority figures who enforce the rules and impose penalties for violations (conduct in the Wilderness is governed by a set of rules laid out in the “Manual,” the most important of which is “leave no traces”). The tensions that arise in Cook’s bulky narrative have various sources: the Community itself, with its ebb and flow of leadership and influence, the loving and combative mother-daughter drama that unfolds between Bea and Agnes, and the nebulous world offstage, where a faceless Administration wields ultimate control over the Wilderness State and from which the Rangers take their orders. As time passes, Community members witness a significant change in the attitude and demeanor in the Rangers, who in the beginning were helpful and encouraging, but later seem to regard the Community with disdain and treat them with high-handed malice. It is the perception that the Rangers pose a threat to the Community’s survival that leads to the fragmentation of the group and the end of the experiment. The novel is compelling to a point: the creative vision that drives the story is stunningly detailed and disturbingly plausible. Diane Cook writes with great confidence; her powers of invention are often strong enough to dispel any doubts and sweep the reader along. But, somewhat like The Community’s trek through the Wilderness, the story too often meanders and at times seems to go in circles, treading ground we’ve already covered. Bea and Agnes carry all the emotional weight, and though we do care what happens to them, the book is simply too long and Cook’s narrative focus too diffuse to sustain the tension. Ultimately, we finish reading The New Wilderness with relief, grateful for the experience but not sorry that it's over.

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In some unspecified future, there's now an eco-dystopia where people all live in a hellish polluted City and there's only one remaining stand of wilderness (of unspecified and seemingly somewhat variable size). 20 people are selected to go into that wilderness and live there as nomads, leaving no trace. This group includes Bea and her daughter Agnes in a desperate effort to save Agnes from pollution induced illness.

The backstory and world building here are fairly loosely sketched--I would have been interested to know more, but the approach prevents any real holes or nitpicking and keeps the focus firmly on the group's progress through the wilderness. Although quite a bit happens, it's very focused on the characters and the group dynamics, as well as the family relationship between Bea, Agnes, and Bea's husband Glen. The author did a lot of research on survival in the American West and it shows; the details are believable. It's an interesting mix of typical dystopian fiction and the group-survival genre (I got a bit of a Walking Dead vibe, though it's not very similar in any other way).

[booklove2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have been looking forward to this one - the first novel of Diane Cook... right at the top of my most anticipated mountain in a year of book releases!  I love the concept here, which somehow has never existed in another novel that I'm aware of yet - there is very little wilderness remaining in this overcrowded dystopia.  All of the land is for manufacturing, garbage, or something involving humans. Things are grim, cities are terrible, children are getting sick, and the main character Bea takes her sick daughter Agnes to the last of the wilderness to get some fresh air (or the freshest it can possibly be anyway).  The initial group of twenty people in the experiment are loosely overseen by the Rangers.  For some reason, I wasn't expecting a group, I was expecting a mother and daughter in the woods.  I was also expecting man vs. nature (which hilariously, I then realized is the very name of Cook's first book).  But there is a whole lotta man vs. man here, despite this wilderness still being very full of animals somehow, when these animals have such a small space to live in.  Of course, in an overcrowded world, it's the people that are the problem.  But the writer isn't writing to my expectations and I liked the book well enough.  Bea is a real mom - flaws and all from page one.  Not a martyr, not a saint, which is a great way to avoid writing a mom.  The book starts with Bea kicking a coyote, which... can you even do that?  Little tricks of the plot make the book great to me.  My only complaint would be the many dramatics within the group, but I'm sure that is a problem with me as a reader.  (I like solitude+forest living sort of books!)  If I had to place this book on a shelf next to others, it would fit right in with MANY of T.C. Boyle's books (The Terranauts, East Is East, A Friend of the Earth and Drop City and The Tortilla Curtain from what I have read) -- both for Boyle's love of nature and also for his love of putting his characters through the ringer.

[librolindsay · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Off the bat, the main thing I can think to say is that I feel like I've been holding my breath since starting this book, and I feel like I'm gulping for air now.

Looking at reviews, I love how incredibly divisive this book is among readers--we either loved it or hated it, not a whole lot in between.

It was haunting and, at times, punishing, but no where nearly as brutal as The Road, which is where my comparison-making brain kept wandering, and that is how this book really shimmers. I love how it examined the mother-daughter relationship.

I think I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An epic, heartbreaking, tale of motherhood and belonging by way of a future climate crisis made worse by bureaucracy and flawed government planning. Set in a far-ish future scenario cities are collapsing into chaos amid worsening climate change / collapse and a wilderness area is set up with a study in progress to see if people can go back to nomadic living and how that will affect the land. Flawed from its inception the government plan is a stop-gap at best, a patch to keep business as usual going forward. It is within this confusion that we find Bea and Agnes. Bea is Agnes Mother and the novel centers on the dynamic between the two women. The cast of characters comes into and out of focus by way of these two women. It is an at time dry-novel its prose is paired down and then expands and blossoms where it needs to and so the pacing feels right and appropriate to the moody tone of the story. Reading closely, Diane Cook has written a deeply complex story about motherhood, longing, coming of age, government failures & flawed 'best intentions', and the climate. It reinforces the feeling of detachment and confusion created by governmental oversight that at the end of things does not seem to really care about anything but keeping government itself running. It really is a story about trust and abandonment. What it means to trust to loose it and what it means to walk away and sometimes come back, rebound, and then leave again. Like the seasons themselves that are warping and changing in response to climate change the story central themes are this ebb and flow of power and trust. The story is beautifully told and the characters reinforce the climate change angle. Which is to say all fiction is now science fiction but the other way around: all fiction is now climate fiction. It just is the backdrop of life and so it plays a central role in the story but Diane Cook writes about it in a natural way that puts the characters up front. Highly recommend.

[dooney-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The New Wilderness takes place in some dystopian, not to distant, future and although the opening scene, of a lone woman, Bea, giving birth to a stillborn child in the forest, a woman who had obviously once lived in a culture at least somewhat like our own, felt compelling, the novel is plagued by inconsistencies and I quickly felt mired down. Nothing in this world makes sense, and although that may be the point -- the very arbitrariness of government and policy and transitions of power, as well as the confusion and blind stupidity this creates -- the act of reading the novel felt arbitrary, illogical, and strained by awkward transitions. The New Wilderness felt somewhat like two novels to me: a not very successful dystopian novel and a second novel about the relationship between a mother and her daughter (Bea and Agnes), about coming to womanhood, and about nurture and abandonment. Agnes herself is richly and fully developed and the relationship between Agnes and her mother is strong and finely nuanced, but finding and savoring that relationship felt much like finding occasional nuggets of gold in a sea of wildly shifting sand. I am sure there are people who loved this novel but I am not one of them. The novel does offer much to discuss however and I would be open to a conversation.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one received so much flak from the Booker community this year, but I personally really enjoyed it. It may be light in some areas, but I thought it was entertaining. The premise, though not satisfactorily explained, was intriguing nonetheless. I enjoyed watching these characters grow and develop individually, as well as within the group. The way the group dynamics shifted with time and with the introduction of new members was well done. I completely understand why this wasn't a favorite of many Booker Prize readers, but I felt this one fell in the middle of this year's pack.

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was immersive but at the same time left me a bit flat—so much telling vs. showing, so many people talking about what they were feeling. The premise was good and pulled me in at the start, but ultimately I'm not sure I bought the setup of the doomed City, the preserved Wilderness, and the human settlers who were more guinea pigs than anything else. Still, it was entertaining and had some food for thought. Though—very minor quibble—I wish we hadn't been given Agnes's middle/last name in the last quarter of the book. That weird little bit of symbolism kept floating into my mind for the rest of the time I was reading.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The cities are dying-ravaged by climate change and overpopulation. There is still a huge area in the country called the Wilderness State, that remains untouched and uninhabited. A group of volunteers have been selected to live here but they have to follow strict guidelines and cannot leave a trace of their existence. Bea, her husband Glen and their young daughter, Agnes are part of this group. How they survive in the following years, against a multitude of challenges, man-made and nature-related, is the meat of this story. Climate change fiction has become a staple of late, and this one is a prime example. A very intriguing idea, and the author has done her research but despite landing a coveted Booker Shortlist spot, I found the book lacking, in depth and soul. Not a bad read by any means, but it never really took off, the way I expected. I much preferred Migrations which also dealt with climate calamities.

[dubaireader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Survival in the wild.I really enjoyed this book and it's quite a wrench coming away from it and back to real life. I was listening to the audio version, narrated by Stacey Glemboski, who did a fabulous job. Life in The City has become a struggle; the pollution and lack of medical care is causing children to die and there seems no way to save them. Bea and Glen are concerned for Agnes, Bea's daughter. The only hope of helping her appears to be to join a party of twenty who are invited to enter The Wilderness State as part of an experimental project. They hope the cleaner air and more basic way of life will be enough to save her.It's a tough life and a sharp learning curve. They have to keep moving, making zero impact on the land and carrying all their rubbish with them until they can dispose of it at a check-in point.I thought the author managed to strike the perfect balance between descriptions of the survival life and the interactions between the members of the group. I loved how Agnes grew up with such a profound understanding of her surroundings and became better than many of the adults at tracking and responding to the behaviour of the animals around her. I also noticed a very brief mention of a shortage of sand for building in the city, something that seems to be making scary news recently.I have just today heard that this book has made it to the finals of this year's Booker prize and I'm kind of surprised, as I don't normally enjoy the Booker nominations, especially the finals list. Of course, I'm now rooting for it to win.Highly recommended, especially in audio.