Overview

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 where the entitlements of whiteness are fading. 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.

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9781068433856

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Reviews

'Ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative.' - Fiammetta Rocco, Caine Prize for African Writing Judge Chair 'An intelligent debut about how young adults negotiate the intricate politics of race and identity in contemporary South Africa.' - Kirkus Reviews '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 '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 of Rise of the Black Panther 'Olufemi Terry's remarkable debut explores the effects of colonialism, social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.' - Harare Review of Books, 'Books from African authors and authors of African descent to look forward to in 2025'

Author Information

Olufemi Terry is a Sierra Leone-born writer, essayist, and journalist. His short fiction has been published in Guernica, The Georgia Review, 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 was an 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 grant from the Washington, DC, Commission on the Arts & Humanities. He is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story 'Stickfighting Days'. He lives in Germany and Cote d'Ivoire.

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