Wilderness of Mirrors

Exquisitely written, absorbing and original, Wilderness of Mirrors is Caine Prize winner Olufemi Terry’s transfixing fiction debut. A prescient political novel set in a parallel, contemporary southern part of Africa still reeling from the effects of racial Partition.

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.

‘In this transfixing novel, Olufemi Terry mines Creoleness, the fluid antithesis of the colonial ‘Root,’ to dissect a parallel South Africa. It’s an exquisitely ironic tour of a society where the neoliberal settlement has made wealth the ultimate partition, and every mirror reflects a different colonial ghost.’ – Brian Chikwava, author of Harare North

‘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

‘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

‘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 loath 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

‘An intelligent debut about how young adults negotiate the intricate politics of race and identity in contemporary South Africa.’ – Kirkus Reviews

About Olufemi Terry’s short story ‘Stickfighting Days’:
‘Ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative.’
– Fiammetta Rocco, 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing Judge Chair