This seems to be a very marmite book and I tend to agree with that. Whilst I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it but found it intriguing in parts.

There’s some really cliched characters and the book doesn’t seem to go anywhere at times but I loved the mother daughter dynamic so that kept me reading on.

An intriguing, quietly compelling dystopian novel, which explores themes of humanity and survival through a mother/daughter relationship. Beautiful descriptions of the wilderness terrain.

The premise of this novel was very interesting but unfortunately I found the execution lacking.

Bea and Agnes are two very complicated characters and I enjoyed the first parts of the story the most. Parts where Bea described Agnes as mimicking her like an animal might, playing at emotions rather than experiencing them. I think there was the most food for thought in these early parts.

I felt ground down by the story. My understanding of the characters didn't really grow as I read more.

The writing in sections was lovely but it wasn't enough to carry this for me.idid finish it but had I known that the ending wouldn't really satisfy I might not have.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. I would read more from this author.

The New Wilderness is the story of Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others who volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace.

I began this book knowing little about it, other than it made the 2020 Booker Prize Shortlist and had been marketed as being somewhere roughly between dystopian and speculative fiction. Whilst there are definitely elements of these two genres, I found this book focused more on the intricacies of relationships and the aspects of human nature. Specifically the relationship between Bea (mother) and Agnes (daughter). How living in such a community alters their relationship as their stay in the Wilderness State lengthens and as Agnes adapts and develops into a young woman in this new environment.

I enjoyed aspects of this book however I found the first half to be quite slow in pace as I was definitely expecting more of the dystopian/speculative element. A handful of characters were quite irritating (as I'm sure I'd be in a Wilderness State), but I found the main set of characters to be well developed and authentic. By the second half I altered my perspective away from dystopia and focused more on what I thought the book was exploring, which was relationships and human interactions. In this headspace I was able to appreciate the narrative to a greater extent.

3.5 stars

This is a really gripping tale exploring what you would give up in order to survive, and more importantly what you would give up for others to survive. In a world where the sir in the City is killing the children that live there, Bea and Glen head to the wilderness with their 6 year old daughter in the hope it will save her life. With 17 other people they form a community who will live off the land, all the time being restricted by a set of rules they must live by whilst living a thoroughly nomadic life.

I really loved this book. It would be great as a book club choice, one with lots of discussion points. With a host of characters who have good and bad traits, it's interesting to think about what you woukd do to survive.

I really enjoyed the book, and felt invested in the characters even though I hated many of them. I felt a little disappointed by the ending, it felt a bit rushed after an epic, thought provoking book, but overall still one I really enjoyed.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020
The main idea of the book sounds amazing, but the novel suffers from three major flaws: The whole set-up makes no sense, there is not enough intellectual depth, and the character development is more or less non-existent. Cook intends to write a climate dystopia in which a group of people leaves the urban areas to live in the wilderness. The whole endeavor is described to be an experiment orchestrated by the authorities - but to what end, especially considering that the group is regularly visiting checkpoints and receiving mail and parcels, thus creating a situation that does in no way represent what it means to survive in the wilderness without interference from the civilized world? The reserach aim of this experiment is pretty dubious.

Then, the author apparently wants to investigate human urges unrestrained by the rules of civilization, or, as The Guardian excitedly puts it: "One of her most compelling concerns in The New Wilderness is the corrosive force of individualism, and how pedestrian the human tendency to destroy really is – how the hardwired urge to self-preserve erodes the possibility of fellowship and forward thinking." People who have seen a school from the inside or have generally wondered why laws exist have probably heard about Thomas Hobbes vs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Cook ponders this continuum on a very superficial level. There is nothing new or challenging to see here.

And then there's the pacing and the characters, and both aspects are just not rendered intriguing enough. It's hard to tell some of those people apart as they are not distinctively drawn. Plus there are really bad sex scenes - granted, I've just read Kink: Stories, which was envisoned by experts in the field, but Cook just doesn't offer enough psychological depth. Above that, the whole thing could have been more concise.

I wish I could have loved this more, because I am convinced the story has potential, but it wasn't thought out and developed well enough. As my GR friend Roman Clodia has rightfully stated, the novel is a cross between "The Hunger Games" and "...I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!" - but it could have been so much more.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook has also made this year’s Booker Prize shortlist and is a dystopian novel in which Bea, Glen and their daughter Agnes escape the smog-filled City to live in the last unpolluted refuge called the Wilderness State along with 17 other volunteers as part of a study to see if humans can successfully coexist with nature. The mother-daughter dynamic between Bea and Agnes is the most interesting aspect of the novel. Agnes thrives under the new conditions whereas Bea struggles a lot with the change, despite having chosen to move there in order to protect Agnes’ health when she suffers from respiratory problems in the City. The environmental themes are intriguing, but the pace is slow and I didn’t find the supporting characters particularly interesting. I also think some of the dystopian elements are a bit too vague and not very clearly explained, which makes it harder to fully appreciate the context the characters find themselves in. Many thanks to Oneworld Publications for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

This wasn't for me, I'm afraid. It was far too overwritten for my personal taste. It was a good concept, though - but the writing style just wasn't my cup of tea.

This novel's timely referencing of the terrors brought by climate emergency portrays a land divided between City and Wilderness plus the fictional 'Private Lands'. Posts are geographic trig markers (and renewal zones) for the central characters, who have agreed for various reasons, to leave the City and inhabit the Wilderness as a social, potentially life-saving, experiment. The original 20 (soon reduced through accident and health) must follow a harrowing routine: move on frequently, leave no trace, carry all garbage, lug around the 'Cast Iron' (a heavy cooking pot), the Book Bag and the Manual, the rules of which must be adhered to at all times.
The Rangers can turn up at any time to inspect their behaviour and to give them instructions. The first half of the book fleshes out this vision with a series of vivid scenes - foraging, preparing and cooking freshly caught food, pit toilets, girls getting a thrill from the sight of pink nail varnish, the grudges held against Bea when she cuts a valuable rope to save another. Societal norms get swallowed up in the sheer fight for survival. When the Newcomers join the Originalists this shift extends to mating behaviour.

At this point the novel shifts into a study of relationship dynamics. The detailing of this theme is overstretched and I had difficulty in sustaining interest in who bedded whom and what their motive was.

When the narrative moves back to its wilderness - the discovery of the Mavericks - it gathers pace again. The Rangers are shown to be a cruel and sinister force. The group are separated, rounded up and, in Agnes' case moved to an urban housing project in Resettlement territory. There is no happy ending. This is the age of the Anthropocene.

Somewhere in the not too distant future, Bea’s daughter Agnes is ill. When a doctor suggests that moving out of the smog-ridden, overcrowded, filthy city might be the answer, Bea allows her husband Glen’s dream to come true. Glen wants to be part of a study that involves living in the Wilderness, a refuge for wildlife. Twenty people are placed in the last wilderness area left, given a Manual on how to behave, and allowed semi-regular contact with the Rangers, including distribution of mail from friends and family.

The novel begins at a point where the Community have already spent several years living in this terrain. Although they claim to do everything by consensus, leaders have emerged, relationships have strengthened and strained, and some of their number are dead. The Rangers tell them they’ve camped too long at one particular spot and send them on a route they’ve never crossed before.

The world Cook creates in The New Wilderness is a microcosm of society. There’s a clear hierarchy from the Administration to the Private Lands (which may or may not exist) to the Rangers to the Community to those living in the city. The rules might be bullshit and are a contradiction to living life in what’s supposed to be a wilderness, highlighting that all rules are created by societies to keep people in their places. There’s also some fetishisation of consumer goods that the Community are supposed to have relinquished.

Alongside this, Cook uses the relationship between Bea and Agnes to look at mothers and daughters. As Agnes grows in age and confidence, their relationship becomes more complex and more challenging. Bea doesn’t agree that she’d do anything for her daughter – moving to the Wilderness has pretty much cost Bea her relationship with her own mother – and isn’t sure she’s doing the right thing anymore.

There’s a good narrative pace to the book and enough intrigue to propel the reader through it, as well as some interesting characters and set pieces. A good debut.

The New Wilderness

Diane Cook

Oneworld Publications.



Here is a blueprint for the world to come:….”Schools were training grounds for jobs that needed filling. Rooftops didn’t have paths, flowers, gardens of vegetables. They had water collection tanks, solar grids, cell towers and barbed wire to guard it all. No one was ever outside unless going from one building to another. A few blocks from their building was one tree, gated so no one could touch it. Somehow it still bloomed every spring, and people came from all over to see its tissue-tender pink flowers. And when the petals later dropped, people crowded around the gate to try to catch those that drifted in the wind…..It was one of ten trees left in the city”.

This is the future George Orwell overlooked.

NetGalley has this novel closeted away under the sub-genre of “Women’s Fiction”. It is not. It is eminently readable for a man and I should know. I am one. It’s long listed for the 2020 Man Booker prize and that makes it fair game for all.

I couldn’t decide if this was dystopian or utopian as it starts out as a foray into a ‘brave new world’ and leaves with despair at a world on the brink of oblivion. An idealistic social experiment that fails when the participants, after years of subsistence living, weaken resolve and the puppeteer's controlling the ‘game’ call it to an end.

The ‘New Wilderness” is not, in the genuine sense of the word, a wilderness, having been cultivated and inhabited, but then there’s now little left of true wilderness on the planet and I’m probably being pedantic. As for the concept of the work I will say it’s a lovely, escapist notion of ‘commune’ that may well have existed in the dreams of the hippy generation of the 70’s. Albeit, far removed from reality.

The true benefactors of ‘the experiment’ were the children taken into it young or born on the ground. The star of the work, young Agnes, for instance “turns eight and doesn’t know it”…as “they no longer marked days” but noticed the years passing by the blooming of the violets in the fields. Can you imagine life bereft of the anxiety of time? Or a habitat with no need of home and contents insurance?

Their few possessions, “…precious knives, the Book Bag, the Cast Iron”, and the Manual of existence, all carried with care and reverence, but they treat the passing of life itself as the natural order of living in the wild.

Cook has done a superb job of putting our future in the hands of a fictitious few, bravely seeking an existence outside of concrete and cell-phone reception; of a group struggling to restart society before it falls into a dystopian mire.
Thanks to Oneworld and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this work.

I'm really enjoying the new explosion of dystopian fiction, rooted in environmental catastrophe and this is a worthy addition to the genre and a refreshing inclusion on the Booker list. Fast paced and thought provoking

This reads like a cross between The Hunger Games for adults and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of here! I'm afraid it didn't work for me: the scenario is thinly-imagined, the writing is workmanlike, the characterisation is barely there and there is a lack of internal consistency: we never understand what the 'experiment' is that has led 20 people to go into The Wilderness; they are not allowed to cultivate land or domesticate animals, they merely wander aimlessly on long treks directed by the Rangers, but they can call a taxi and leave any time they like. They're there for years but their families can write to them and send in parcels (they receive gateaux and elaborate cakes which seems bizarre!), new people arrive wearing Bermuda shorts and strappy sandals yet somehow there's no mention of them struggling with treks over mountain ranges and rivers... I don't know, this almost reads to me like a self-parody of the genre.

Curb Your Dystopianism

The New Wilderness sets a mother-daughter drama against a dystopian backdrop—a world overrun with polluted, overpopulated cities, with only one tiny pocket of nature remaining. Sounds great, but this story is more like a really terrible camping trip than a convincing possible future.

In the beginning, there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources—oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food—or storage—trash, servers, toxic waste—such interactions had become lost to history.

The novel revolves around city-raised Bea and her child-of-the-wild Agnes. There are other characters who exist only to be redshirted or fulfil cliché plot functions. The worldbuilding is weak and illogical and doesn’t serve the story—this could just as easily have been a pre-2020 story about a mother-daughter duo in a hippy survivalist cult, and honestly, I think it would have turned out better that way.

Agnes emerges eventually as a somewhat interesting character, an otherworldly girl who grows into confidence and autonomy, clashing with Bea both personally and ideologically. She just isn’t given nearly enough to do beyond observe.

The Community, amid the usual power plays and intrigues, wanders aimlessly, much like the plot. After a long, dull trudge, the novel’s conclusion is a breathless rush, checking off plot points and predictable twists like someone speeding to get through all their remaining PowerPoint slides in the final 5 minutes of their presentation.

In the absence of coherent worldbuilding, this book needed something else—emotional engagement, thrilling plot or stand-out writing—but I didn’t find these either (sample prose: The girl’s eyes clouded over with the clouds that rolled overhead.)

So, I was left to bat away persistent niggling questions: Why are they lugging books around yet they’re still so clueless? Why do magazines and snail mail still exist? Why is there zero mention of indigenous history when it's obviously relevant to this story? etc. One big ‘But WHY???’

The New Wilderness has a great elevator pitch but sloppy execution and is a forgettable entry in the cli-fi genre. 2.5 dirt encrusted stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The New Wilderness explores a not-too-distant world where the climate crisis has eliminated all natural spaces except for a heavily patrolled Wilderness State, in which twenty people are studied as part of an experiment to determine the benefits of natural living. Through the eyes of Bea and her daughter Agnes, Cook explores what it means to survive and grow up within the threat of climate catastrophe and overpopulation. Cook's writing is beautiful, and I devoured this book in just a couple of days. Both Bea and Agnes are strong female characters in the best sense, complex and not easily likeable but eminently understandable. The arc of the mother-daughter bond and what happens to it as a child grows up is also tenderly explored in the novel, alongside the ever-present threat of male violence and domination. I hope it makes the Booker shortlist!

Even if it's well written I didn't liked the characters and the story fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This is such an original, terrifying and thought provoking read that scared me so much with the possibilities I almost wanted to put it down!
This is the story of Bea and her daughter Agnes, in a time where climate change and overcrowding has destroyed cities and made them almost impossible to stay alive in for the young and sick. Watching her daughter suffering and ill all the time, Bea signs them up to a study in which 20 people from the City will live in The Wilderness - a place that has not yet been ruined by humans. They will have to learn to live as one with nature, leaving no trace of their nomadic existence, but will their relationship withstand the harsh brutality of the wilderness they now call home?
This whole story felt like a warning from Cook and there was definitely quite a political focus to it, not only about our environmental impact, but also how important the future generations are - whilst Bea is the mother who does whatever it takes to save her daughter, it is Agnes who thrives in the wilderness and understands how to live off the land.
There is a dark heart to this story, and as you would expect from a tale of survival in the wild, quite a lot of animal brutality and death which I always struggle with. However, Cook has a way of painting a landscape with her words which is absolutely enthralling, and the characters were so well balanced that I just kept wanting more.
It makes absolute sense to me that this is a Booker nominee - completely offbeat, smart and it packs a powerful punch!

This ecological tale is set in the near future. American cities have become overcrowded, consuming massive amounts resources, so that there only one area of untouched terrain left. Twenty volunteers choose to take part in an experiment, to see how they can survive in this "Wilderness state". They have minimal possessions and are allowed to hunt & forage, but they must leave no trace of themselves behind. They are expected to follow rules laid out in a manual, while Rangers watch their movements. Among this community are Bea and Agnes, a mother and daughter. Agnes was very sick as a child in the city, and Bea brought her on this study in the desperate hope that her health would improve. She has thrived and taken to this new life in a positive way, picking up many valuable skills. Bea on the other hand misses her old life and finds herself becoming a reluctant leader of the group. The story follows the community's struggle to survive, as they drift farther from the guidelines set out for them.

I'm afraid this novel moved too slowly for me to enjoy it. Especially at the beginning, it takes such a long time to get going. It seems like there are endless descriptions of the landscape. Eventually the mother-daughter friction starts to get interesting, but I'm afraid it will have lost many readers by that point. It is a very timely tale, addressing an urgent topic like climate change in a thoughtful way. And its portrayal of maternal love is quite moving at times. I just wish the book's editor had cut about a hundred pages from it. With some tightening up, it could have been a much more effective parable.

To escape an overcrowded city where people are struggling with the living conditions, twenty people applied and were chosen to participate in a social / enviro project called ‘The New Wilderness’. But this back to basics approach brings its own challenges that breed and fester among the little population, some of whom are more 'complicated' than others.

The land nurtured for the wilderness is the polar opposite of what they left behind, although there are damning remnants of previous human intervention which serve as a stark reminder that recovery and survival hangs precariously in the balance.

This is ‘Lord of the Flies’ for adults, and the same behavioural drive is present – fear, hunger, resentment, and control. It’s a depressing, yet hugely effective, indication of just how fragile everything is – particularly our morals.

The burning questions are: how will this nomadic escape from the shackles of overpopulation affect these naive volunteers in the long term? Will the project thrive, or is it doomed to fail?

Many well-written passages evoke the brutal struggles of this ramshackle gaggle of young and old, and everything that we take for granted. But I couldn’t help feeling the story was drawn out longer than was necessary. Still a good read though, and something different at that.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this book. The premise was initially intriguing - a group of people escaping overcrowded, polluted cities to take part in an experiment into living nomadic lives in a wilderness area - but the execution left me cold. I still have no idea what the experiment was supposed to prove or how the results of it would be used.

Apart from Agnes, I was disappointed that the characters were not fleshed out enough to become engaging and the dynamics between them, touched upon now and again, were not explored meaningfully. Agnes I did enjoy, though, and her coming-of-age story worked well, as did the progress of her relationship with her mother, Bea. These aspects alone kept me turning the pages, but it seemed to take forever to get to the final action.

Not a book I’d particularly recommend, far too long for the little that goes on.