On Tuesday, August 4th, we had the pleasure of welcoming Diane Cook to Door to Door to discuss The New Wilderness, along with legendary author Jonathan Lethem, who discussed his upcoming novel The Arrest. You can watch the replay below!
As you can tell from our interview, the Library Love Fest team was blown away by
The New Wilderness. Timely, haunting, beautiful, and challenging, this book will stay with you long after the final page.
Below, you can check out just a sampling of the praise this unforgettable novel has received. The New Wilderness goes on sale August 11th, so you can pre-order your copy now!
Praise for The New Wilderness
"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
"More than a version of ‘Survivor: Woodlands,’ this novel asks tough questions about love and sustainability."
—Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post
"In this wry, speculative debut novel, Cook envisions a crowded and polluted near future in which only one natural area remains, the Wilderness State.... Cook’s unsettling, darkly humorous tale explores maternal love and man’s disdain for nature with impressive results."
—Publishers Weekly review
"This ecological horror story (particularly horrifying now) explores painful regions of the human heart."
—Kirkus Reviews 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.... 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."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist review
"I’ve been impatiently waiting for Diane Cook’s first novel since I discovered her collection, Man V. Nature, in 2014. It’s finally here—and to answer your first question, yes, it was indeed worth the wait...it tackles the deepest of human emotions—as well as big ideas about the planet—in satisfying ways. Also, it’s a page-turner!"
—Emily Temple, author of The Lightness and Managing Editor at Literary Hub
"Few books electrify me the way Cook’s surreal short story collection Man V. Nature did, but her debut novel—which continues her exploration of the interplay between nature and civilization—has done it again."
—Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed
"[Diane Cook] returns this summer with her first novel, a dystopian tale being compared to Station Eleven. A mother and daughter flee the dangers of pollution and join a community that hopes to build a new life in protected wilderness. But how to live in nature and not destroy it? These are questions many of us are already asking, and we can’t wait to dive into Cook’s exploration."
—BookPage
"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 and The Glass Hotel
"The New Wilderness left me as stunned as a deer in headlights. Gut-wrenching and heart-wrecking, this is a book that demands to be read, and urgently. With beauty and compassion, Diane Cook writes about the precariousness of life on this planet, about the things that make us human—foremost the love between mothers and daughters, at once complex and elemental. Cook observes humanity as a zoologist might—seeing us exactly as the strange animals we really are."
—Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
"Diane Cook upends old tropes of autonomy, survival, and civilization to reveal startling new life teeming beneath, giving a glimpse into the ways the world we think we know could come unstuck and come to life in the care of the women and girls of the future. This is not just a thrilling, curious, vibrant book--but an essential one, a compass to guide us into the future."
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
-Chris
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