THE NEW WILDERNESS

Diane Cook is the author of the novel, The New Wilderness, which was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man v. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, The Pen/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, daughter and son.

Washington Post Notable Book of Fiction of 2020
NPR Best Book of 2020
Buzzfeed Best Book of 2020
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“The environmental novel of our times.” —Lemn Sissay, Booker Prize Judge

“A virtuosic debut, brutal and beautiful in equal measure.” —Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

“The emotional core of the novel—and its true source of brilliance—lies in the relationship between Bea and Agnes, the most intricate and morally arresting relationship Cook has conjured to date.”  – Nation

“Expertly plotted . . . highly seductive writing . . . It is the anthropological acuity in Cook’s writing that makes it so persuasive. She explores how our nature is informed by the land we inhabit, how our conception of civility is relative to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.” – Times Literary Supplement (London)

“The novel tackles the deepest of human emotions—as well as big ideas about the planet—in satisfying ways. Also, it’s a page-turner!” – LitHub

“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

“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

“A soulful, urgent debut…The push-pull ambivalence of Bea and Agnes’s bond forms its beating heart…What lingers, beyond the awesome power of Bea and Agnes as heroines, is pure wonderment at all in this world of ours that is not human.”
-The Guardian

“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

“A dazzling debut…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.”

-Téa Obreht, Author of The Tiger’

s Wife

“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

1. How do the children who grow up in the Wilderness State differ from the adults who moved there voluntarily?

2. What is The Group’s relationship to death?

3. Is it possible to survive in the Wilderness State?Can humans truly coexist with nature?

4. List all the mother/daughter relationships in the novel. How do they differ? How are they similar?

5. What are some of the more hopeful moments and storylines throughout the novel?

6. Diane Cook wrote this novel before the current crisis – what parts of the novel are similar to the situation we’re currently facing?

7. There are multiple layers to this story – mother/daughter relationships, human’s relationship to nature, a harrowing look at our possible future. Which storyline did you find most compelling?

8. How do you think you would fare in the Wilderness State, and why?

How did you start writing The New Wilderness?

I thought of the idea for this book when I was still writing my story collection in 2012. I thought it would be a short short—as in a story that was only 1000 words. A story that just played with one idea. I took a day to write down all the ideas and thoughts I had, and all the characters, and I realized—oh, no, this isn’t a short-short. This is a novel.

What made you choose to set the book in the Pacific Northwest?

I spent a lot of time in Eastern Oregon when writing this book. It is the high desert, the edge of the Great Basin, with sage seas and rocky eruptions of mountains,plates that rise and slide over other plates. It’s a landscape where you can see how the earth came to be. It is also pretty empty. And that was key to my book. I hadn’t always intended to have it take place here. But it was a lucky break I spent a couple of months there when I was first really beginning to seriously write the novel and the landscape was not something I could ignore. It was perfect. I wish I could write about this landscape forever.

The book really centers on the relationships between mothers and daughters. Is that something you knew you wanted to write about?

When I started this book, I knew it would be about mothers and daughters. My mother died in 2008. A lot of the stories in my collection are me working through ideas on death and grief. With The New Wilderness, I was still exploring that relationship—what happens to your past when the people who shared it are gone? I approached the story as the daughter I was. Then two years ago I became pregnant and had a daughter. Suddenly, I was on the other end of this relationship, but interestingly with even more questions for my mother. I began the novel as a daughter thinking about mothers and daughters, and ended it as a mother to a daughter, thinking about mothers and daughters.