Synopsis
To satisfy his father’s request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil—a young Creole from a wealthy background—sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter —the mother city. Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud’s theories and with her place in a society marked by shifting cultural hierarchies.
Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka—the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country’s fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations—and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.
Praise
‘I loved this novel, at once vivid and mysterious, beautiful and frightening. Olufemi Terry speaks with great clarity and precision to the aimlessness and self-disconnect of youth, the formlessness of relationships developed under liminal conditions, and the frightening sensation of being gradually absorbed into something vast and opaque. Emil is a fascinating protagonist; Wilderness of Mirrors follows his movements closely, yet he remains – to himself, too – often half-absent, though occasionally brought into sharp focus and placed under the lens of his own self-analysis. Wilderness of Mirrors follows Emil’s search for meaning and emotion amidst the mysteries of himself and of the parallel South Africa in which the novel is set, to deeply absorbing, often destabilising effect.”
Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
‘Wilderness of Mirrors is an unsentimental portrait of young adulthood in a city both beguiling and perilous, and which reflects Africans as they are too rarely depicted: hybrid, modern, and shaped by their own profound contradictions. Terry's pared but illuminating prose captures the weight of its protagonists' search for their place in the world.’
Lola Shoneyin, author of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
“Terry perfectly captures how youthful decisions—or indecisions—can have radical impacts on the rest of our lives.”
Electric Literature