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The New Wilderness

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The New Wilderness

By: Diane Cook
Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
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About this listen

Shortlisted for 2020 Booker Prize

From an acclaimed Guardian First Book Award finalist comes a debut novel.

Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: the Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now.

Bea and Agnes join 18 other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. They must slowly learn how to live in the unpredictable, often dangerous Wilderness, leaving no trace on their surroundings in their quest to survive. But as Agnes embraces this new existence, Bea realises that saving her daughter's life might mean losing her in ways she hadn't foreseen.

At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary, urgent novel from a celebrated new literary voice.

©2020 Diane Cook (P)2020 W F Howes Dystopian Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Wilderness

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Critic reviews

“Cook's is a fresh and vivid voice; it's unsurprising the likes of Miranda July and Roxane Gay are fans.” (Observer)

“The New Wilderness is a virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure.” (Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel)
All stars
Most relevant
I have to keep telling myself it’s ok and we aren’t here yet. eech, but we will be. a poignant personal story, and a truly foreboding portent.

<holds own hand in reassurance>

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Impossible to say why I liked the story without spoilers but the language was true, honest, cruel, kind and poetic. It didn't just show emotions, it moved me. I will read more of her work.

Brutal and tender.

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The ballad of Beatrice and Agnes is set in a mythic and dystopia future, which has certain contradictions, with much unexplained. The story of a girl growing to maturity wild and free, but under threat is well written and narrated. Estrangement from family and from nature are at the heart, and the killing of what we love.

Environmental dystopia

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I struggled to finish this book. The main child character is particularly disturbing in her lack of warmth and inability to reciprocate love, but the absence of bonding and mutual care is pervasive in the atmosphere of the book.

A cold book about cold people

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Didn't wrap up like I felt it should, bit abrupt ending. Worth a listen though :)

Strong start

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