The New Wilderness

'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)

'Wonderfully imagined and written, this is a tense future-shock novel that's also a tender exploration of a mother-daughter relationship under extreme pressure.' Booker Prize judges

'The New Wilderness is Diane Cook's debut novel that brings to life a wildly imaginative and terrifying dystopian story of a mother's battle to save her daughter from a world ravaged by climate change. Touching on humanity and our contempt for nature, this is a timely and compelling novel.' Independent

'A visceral, elemental performance... Dense with believable detail.' The Sunday Times

'Riveting... Bleakly compelling, and leavened by wry, sparkling humour that Cook combines seamlessly with existential dread.' Daily Telegraph

'This gut-wrenching story of survival, danger, power, control and, most importantly, love is one you won’t want to put down.' CNN

'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

'An absolutely riveting and propulsive novel. Terrifying, and as real as can be. Epic in scale and story; granular and recognisable in people and place. The New Wilderness is surely an instant classic in our stories of survival, sovereignty and adaptation. Cook's writing is so sure-footed, prescient and trustworthy, it's all the reader can do to follow her. For fans of Ling Ma's Severance and Hernan Diaz's In the Distance, and many, many readers in between.' Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter