Wilderness of Mirrors

by Olufemi Terry

Overview

Exquisitely written and deeply absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize–winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in a country still reeling from the lasting effects of racial partition and colonialism.

When his father suggests that he take some time off to visit his cousin, Emil—a young surgeon-in-training—doesn’t ask many questions. For reasons he doesn’t yet understand, he sets aside his studies and moves into his aunt’s house in Stadmutter, a remote multiracial African city. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by encounters with Bolling, a wealthy foreigner who woos him intellectually and sexually, and Tamsin, a psychology student working to define herself against the fading privilege of her background.

Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Bolling is covertly working with Braeem Shaka, an advocate for reparations, to foment racial tension that imperils the country’s fragile progress. As Shaka becomes a wanted man, Emil and Tamsin grow entangled in his future and that of a country they are both eager to escape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632063991
Publisher:	Restless Books
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Olufemi Terry is a Sierra-Leone born writer, essayist and journalist living in Germany and Cote d’Ivoire. His short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, Guernica, 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 has been the 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 Washington DC Arts & Humanities Grant. A former juror of the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize.

Editorial Reviews

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

“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

From the Publisher

2025-07-04
An intelligent debut about how young adults negotiate the intricate politics of race and identity in contemporary South Africa.

Emil, a Creole man in training to be a neurosurgeon, needs a break, and his politically connected father urges him to visit the town of Stadmutter, in the Deep South, to reconnect with his less cosmopolitan cousins. There, Emil finds he’s mostly on his own. His aunt, a widow, is busy at work and pursuing a romance that keeps her away from home. The cousin he expected to bond with, Torrance, who resembles him physically and in ambition, has moved out in part to make room for Emil, leaving Andres, who collects disability and devotes himself mostly to video games with a friend and small-time schemes and drug dealing. Left to his own perilous aimlessness, Emil ventures into a club, and immediately falls under the sway of Bolling, a Haitian German philosopher/gadfly who has both sexual and intellectual designs on him. Emil is befriended, too, by Tamsin, a psychology Ph.D. student who like him is a child of ambivalent privilege, and they get entangled, erotically and otherwise. They soon encounter an enigmatic quasi-protege of Bolling, Braeem Shaka, leader of an upstart Creole political movement that seeks reparations and is viewed as a threat by the governor. Eventually, Shaka becomes a hunted outlaw, and Emil finds that he has been drafted by the absent Bolling into being Shaka’s protector—a role into which he recruits Tamsin. The result is 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? Novels of passivity and bewilderment are hard to make work, but Terry does a nice job of dramatizing the lives of young intellectuals adrift in a chaos of possibilities.

A novel about awkward coming-of-age in a country negotiating the same bewildering passage.

Kirkus Reviews