About the book

When his father suggests he take time off to visit estranged relatives, Emil—a young surgeon-in-training—sets aside his studies and, for reasons he doesn’t yet understand, moves to Stadmutter, a multiracial city at the southern tip of Africa. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by his encounters with Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German who woos him intellectually and sexually, and with Tamsin, a PhD student working to define herself against her country’s shifting cultural hierarchies.

Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. As Bolling’s covert support for an upstart Creole movement threatens decades of racial progress, Emil is drawn increasingly toward exile.

Read an excerpt from the beginning of the novel in Brittle Paper and a heady sampling in LitHub from a later portion of the story. Enjoy!

PRAISE FOR WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS:

“Terry perfectly captures how youthful decisions—or indecisions—can have radical impacts on the rest of our lives.”
— Electric Literature

“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, Rise of the Black Panther

“A novel of dreamy indolence and big ideas: When and where will Emil find himself when at last he emerges from the haze of uncertainty, when he decides who and what and where he’s going to be?”

— Kirkus Reviews

“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

“Olufemi Terry’s remarkable debut explores the effects of colonialism, social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.”

— Harare Review of Books

About the author: