Wilderness of Mirrors

‘A book that explores themes of identity, race, privilege, dislocation, and political unrest in a post-apartheid society. You could also call it the sexual and intellectual coming-of-age story of a young surgeon in post-apartheid South Africa.' – Dipo Faloyin, 'The Long Wave', Guardian

‘Emil, a young Creole man, goes to Stadmutter (Cape Town), a place his father disdains as a “caste society”. Quite the contrast for someone from eGeld (Johannesburg)”where it is difficult, over the telephone, to tell Black from White or Creole”. Emil comes under the spell of Haitian-German Lukas Bolling, a “jet-set provocateur with money and amoral instincts”. There’s Braeem Shaka, whose agitations for Creole reparations puts him in the crosshairs of government. Emil, an aspiring neurosurgeon, must find his own path as tension builds. Beguiling in its specificity, Terry’s novel is a granular exploration of race in South Africa.’ – Molara Wood, Irish Times

'There are good novels, like Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, that thrust you into an eerie setting and make it seem perfectly normal. And there are great novels, like Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, that take a familiar place and render it totally alien. What's special about Wilderness of Mirrors is that its setting is mystical and graspable in equal measure, putting the very foundations of fiction into question … Wilderness of Mirrors is the 21st century's answer to W Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. Like that novel's narrator, Emil steps back in the hope of finding both meaning and disinterest. But in this world - and ours - there's no chance of neutrality.' – Conrad Landin, New Internationalist

'An absorbing perspective on the rapidly changing society of South Africa, Wilderness of Mirrors loosens out the rainbow collective of peoples to examine racial tensions held fast within its free-market economics...This is an ambitious book taking the reader to a world rarely encountered in European literary fields... an exciting new vision from a writer well worth watching.' – Fiona O'Connor, Morning Star

'Emil is a classic example of a young man trying to find himself in the world [while] Bolling is an enigma, a catalyst [...] providing the plot with intrigue and a certain danger. As a protagonist, Emil is quite his opposite, dispassionate and detached, but that suits Terry’s measured prose well, making this a novel to savour, and think about.' – Annabel Gaskell, Shiny New Books

'Wilderness of Mirrors skilfully traces the difficult afterlives of apartheid and racial segregation to great effect.’ – Vanessa Peterson, ‘What to Read This Winter’, Frieze

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

'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 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 Shamiso

'Ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative.' - Fiammetta Rocco, 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing Judge Chair, about Olufemi Terry's short story 'Stickfighting Days'

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

'Olufemi Terry's remarkable debut explores the effects of colonialism, social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.' - Harare Review of Books

'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

A complex, strange, and nuanced novel that unfolds like a feast of political, social, and conversational threads, all gradually tilting toward the abyss. In Wilderness of Mirrors, the narrative feels both expansive and unsettling, lingering in the mind with its layered tensions and elusive meanings.’ – Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily