The new wilderness : a novel / Diane Cook.

Title:

Summary:

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. 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.

Author:

Cook, Diane, 1976- author

Edition:

First edition.

Format:

Books

Genre:

Dystopias.

Subject Term:

Civilization -- Fiction.

Nature -- Effect of human beings on -- Fiction.

Wilderness areas -- Fiction.

Hunting and gathering societies -- Fiction.

Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.

Air -- Pollution -- Fiction.

Environmental quality -- Fiction.

Survival -- Fiction.

ISBN:

9780062333131

9780861540013

9780861540372

9781786078216

Physical Description:

398 pages ; 24 cm.

Publication Date:

2020

Available in Onecard network:

Library

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Shelf Location

Adult Fiction

Shelf Number

COO D

Item Barcode

C0491008794

Material Type

Book

Status

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Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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, 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.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this wry, speculative debut novel (after the collection Man v. Nature), Cook envisions a crowded and polluted near future in which only one natural area remains, the Wilderness State. Twenty people volunteer for a government experiment in how humans fare in the wilderness--it's been so long since anyone tried that no one remembers. Among the volunteers are Glen, "an important person" at a university; his wife, Bea; and Bea's daughter, Agnes, and they, along with the others, collectively called "The Community," learn to eke out a precarious existence hunting with bows and arrows, tanning animal hides, and negotiating dangerous terrain. As the years pass unmarked other than with Bea noticing a fourth annual appearance of violet blossoms, the volunteers gradually abandon their commitments to the study, though they remain expected to obey rules enforced by Rangers--never stay in one place longer than seven days, never leave a trace--as members die off. More waitlisted refugees, called Newcomers, arrive from the city, and Bea perseveres, driven by hope for Agnes's future. Cook powerfully describes the Community members' transformation from city folk to primal beings, as they become fierce, cunning, and relentless in their struggle for survival and freedom, such as when Bea faces off with a mother coyote. Cook's unsettling, darkly humorous tale explores maternal love and man's disdain for nature with impressive results. (Aug.)

Guardian Review

In The New Wilderness, Diane Cook's Booker prize-longlisted debut novel, the end isn't so much "nigh" as "come and gone". The cataclysm of civilisation has overwhelmed all but a single natural preserve called the Wilderness State, home to the last remnants of North American wildlife, and a small band of nomads called the Community. We venture into this inhospitable world in the varyingly close and distant third-person company of Bea, a young mother who has made the impossible and inadvisable decision to join an experiment in the Wilderness State in order to save her little daughter, Agnes, from the wasted City, whose poisoned air has been killing her since the day she was born. One of 20 initial volunteers, Bea is part of an experiment allegedly intended to determine whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. The Community, of which she is a reluctant and pragmatically sceptical member, is tethered to meaning by a set of precious implements - the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, and most importantly the Manual that spells out the rules of their existence, over which the Rangers, to whose whims the experiment and its participants are subject, hold sway. Bea's fellow Community members are not the scientists and experts her well-meaning partner Glen envisioned volunteering for the experiment when he first founded it; they come, instead, from walks of life incompatible with survival in the Wilderness State, and their missteps are often costly and harrowing. As one might expect of ordinary souls thrown into extraordinary strife, the Community's politicking grows ever more self-serving and craven, and - as their existence is challenged by Newcomers and the unravelling of the structures they were told to believe in - their respective motivations veer further and further from a shared objective. Cook remains as dubious of our species' trajectory as she was in her rich and original short story collection, Man V. Nature. One of her most compelling concerns in The New Wilderness is the corrosive force of individualism, and how pedestrian the human tendency to destroy really is - how the hardwired urge to self-preserve erodes the possibility of fellowship and forward thinking. Above all, she seems to ask: how will we regard one another once the climate crisis finally becomes the uncontested crucible of our time? She explores this question through Bea and Agnes's turbulent relationship, passing the narrative torch from mother to daughter about halfway through the book. We are aligned first with Bea, who grew up and sometimes still longs for the polluted City; and then with Agnes, a true nomad, for whom the Wilderness State has always been home. The unease between mother and daughter as they navigate disparate understandings of self, belonging, society and each other is the beating heart of the novel. There's a lot of landscape in The New Wilderness, and Cook's prose is at its finest when she trains her eye on the natural world. The harsh, dazzling setting seems to be one of the few things to which the characters react with much awe or emotion - but for me, their ambivalence toward so many other aspects of life comes at a cost. Cook's desired intention, I believe, must be to highlight the mutedness with which her characters have come to experience events that would horrify most 21st-century readers: a fatal mauling, a fall down an abyss, even the tragic stillbirth of a child whose personhood is heartbreakingly discounted by a Ranger in one of the novel's most poignant scenes. But to numb the narrative consciousness to these events, the text must numb the reader, too. This is achieved by destabilising our sense of time, pulling the perspective back, and blurring details that would have given us a more precise sense of Bea, Agnes, and the world around them. Characters united by little else are united in their ambivalence. They see each other in vague and general terms. They seem to have little understanding of one another as actual people with pasts and vulnerabilities. The objective here may be to show us how people living with the expectation of death don't put much stock in each other's individuality; but its unintended effect is to distance the reader. I often found myself wondering how people thrown into this kind of experiment - into a radical reshaping of mind, body, and sense of both society and time - could stay such strangers for so long. Still, I am confident that this distancing effect will not trouble every reader. Cook takes command of a fast-paced, thrilling story to ask stomach-turning questions in a moment when it would benefit every soul to have their stomach turned by the prospect of the future she envisions. I, for one, was grateful for the journey.

Kirkus Review

In a dystopian future, a woman and her daughter leave behind the increasingly unlivable conditions of the all-consuming City, where most of the population is trapped, to join a survival study in the Wilderness State. As part of the study, Bea and Agnes have been members of the Community since it began when Agnes was a "frail, failing little girl." The Community, originally 20 adults and children before various births and deaths, travels the wild as a ragtag pack, rife with typical internal politics. Members carry their few possessions on their backs and eat what they can forage and kill by hand or bow, leaving no human traces in their wake. They live according to the Manual, watched over from afar by the Rangers who make sure everyone follows the Manual's rules. Bea misses aspects of her urban life, however difficult it was, but her powers of psychological observation make her "good at this survival thing." Agnes, whose "health cratered" from breathing City air--the reason Bea joined the study--is now vitally healthy, with a natural instinct for primitive skills. As she tells the grown-ups, "follow the animals." The viewpoint shifts over time from prickly, tormented Bea, whose romantic loyalties are unclear but whose motherly protectiveness is fiercely all-consuming, to Agnes, who grows up in a world where natural order trumps human-made rules. The push-pull of ambivalent but powerful love between mother and daughter centers the novel. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

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). Interior designer Bea, ferociously pragmatic, is determined to save her ailing young daughter, Agnes, from the City's toxic smog, so her professor husband signs them up for an experiment involving people living in the Wilderness State as nomadic hunters and gatherers. As they endure deprivation and terror, recreate this ancient way of life, and experience moments of transcendence in nature's glory, Rangers police them from trucks and helicopters, making them feel like lab rats. As fiercely precise and intimate as Cook's physical descriptions are, the novel's edgy bewitchment is generated by her characters' elaborately elucidated psychological struggles. Bea is admirable and monstrous. Agnes grows strong, emotionally perceptive, and precocious in the ways of the wild. Alternating as narrators, they illuminate the primal complexities of the mother-daughter bond as well as the battles for dominance within the group. 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. When Cook finally widens the lens on her characters' increasingly desperate predicament, the exposure of malignant greed, deceit, and injustice resonates with devastating impact.

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The new wilderness : a novel / Diane Cook.

Available in Onecard network:

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Guardian Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

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