Overview

Exquisitely written and deeply absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize-winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in a country still reeling from the lasting effects of racial partition and colonialism. When his father suggests that he take some time off to visit his cousin, Emil--a young surgeon-in-training--doesn't ask many questions. For reasons he doesn't yet understand, he sets aside his studies and moves into his aunt's house in Stadmutter, a remote multiracial African city. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by encounters with Bolling, a wealthy foreigner who woos him intellectually and sexually, and Tamsin, a psychology student working to define herself against the fading privilege of her background. Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Bolling is covertly working with Braeem Shaka, an advocate for reparations, to foment racial tension that imperils the country's fragile progress. As Shaka becomes a wanted man, Emil and Tamsin grow entangled in his future and that of a country they are both eager to escape.

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9781632063984

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Reviews

""A novel of dreamy indolence and big ideas: When and where will Emil find himself when at last he emerges from the haze of uncertainty, when he decides who and what and where he's going to be?"" -- Kirkus Reviews ""In Wilderness of Mirrors, Olufemi Terry conjures up a parallel South Africa where, although apartheid is decades gone, its young people move through an existential transience, fitfully straining to reckon with the gaps their country's history has left them. For Emil and Tamsin, there's no coming of age, only a hollow sense that they should be doing more with selves they are still figuring out. It's a world that is all too familiar, yet Terry transfixes the reader such that we are loathe to turn away."" -- Evan Narcisse, author, Rise of the Black Panther

Author Information

Olufemi Terry is a Sierra-Leone born writer, essayist and journalist living in Germany and Cote d'Ivoire. His short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, Guernica, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and translated into French and German. His nonfiction essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Africa is a Country, and The Guardian. He has been the International Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, Scotland and a Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University's Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice in Washington, DC. In 2019, he received a Washington DC Arts & Humanities Grant. A former juror of the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize.

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