Booker Prize shortlistee The New Wilderness is an intense, impactful story that tackles our very current environmental crisis head on with a haunting reimagining of a world ravaged by climate change and overpopulation.
Diane Cook
Beatrice’s five-year-old daughter Agnes is dying – the smog and pollution of the overbuilt City is destroying her lungs. Their final fight for life is to join eighteen other volunteers as part of an attempt to inhabit the recently forbidden-to-humans Wilderness State, the last remaining area of nature where forests meet desert and wild animals roam. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Adhering to strict nomadic, low-impact hunter-gatherer guidelines, they must now learn to survive in this new, unpredictable land.
This story is, first and foremost, a dire ecological warning. Using a dystopian lens, Diane Cook presents a world in which humanity, after eradicating nature from the city, must revert to primitive ways of living to again be part of nature without destroying it. This is a not wholly inconceivable future where the extremes of climate change and overpopulation come to a destructive head, resulting in an environment that’s thick, smothering and unliveable. In contrast, Cook breathes life into a vast, menacing wilderness with wild animals roaming and harsh lands to be crossed. The duality of nature is wonderfully encapsulated within The New Wilderness, as Cook invokes its unforgiving ferocity alongside its natural balm of reinvigoration and rejuvenation.
At the heart of this story is the tumultuous, fierce and unbreakable relationship between mother and daughter. Beatrice and Agnes’ heartbreaking journey is hard to watch, as they endure and suffer in equal measure, and the full spectrum of human nature is on show in The New Wilderness. Wild nature becomes the perfect backdrop to moments of betrayal and love, and of battles for power and control, as they fight for survival – all in the hope of a better future in their new home.
Arriving amongst a publication wave of environmental speculative fiction, The New Wilderness stands out with an originality and intensity that is particularly thought-provoking. Beautifully imagined, it is a bold read that is at once completely terrifying and wholly captivating.
—The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Bloomsbury Publishing Australia) is out now.
The New Wilderness
Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is wasting away, ravaged by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home. Bea knows she cannot stay in the city, but there is only one alternative - The Wilderness State. This vast expanse of unwelcoming, untamed land is untouched by mankind. Until now.
Somewhere between a science experiment and a refugee, Bea and Agnes slowly learn how to live in this unpredictable, often dangerous land. But as Agnes embraces this radically free new existence, Bea realises that her bond with her...
The 2020 Booker Prize shortlist is here! 
The 2020 Booker Prize longlist is here!
Comments
No comments