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.

PRAISE FOR WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS:

“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, critic and narrative designer

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