A01=Olufemi Terry
African literature
alternate history
apartheid
Author_Olufemi Terry
Caine Prize
Caine Prize winner
Cape Town
Category=FBA
Category=FDK
Category=FXP
Category=JBFA1
debut novel
decreolization
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family drama
Freud
Heidegger
J.M. Coetzee
Les Fugitives
literary fiction
Mohsin Hamid
Nureddin Farah
Olufemi Terry
philosophical novel
political fiction
post-apartheid fiction
post-colonial literature
racial partition
Sierra Leonean author
Sierra Leonean fiction
South Africa
urban African literature
V.S. Naipul
Wilderness of Mirrors
Product details
- ISBN 9781068433856
- Dimensions: 135 x 180mm
- Publication Date: 19 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Les Fugitives
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Olufemi Terry, born in Sierra Leone and educated in Yorkshire and New York, is a writer, essayist and journalist, and the author of Wilderness of Mirrors (2026). His short fiction has been published in Guernica, The Georgia Review, 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 grant from the Washington, DC, Commission on Arts & Humanities. A former juror for both the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story "Stickfighting Days." He lives in Germany and Cote d'Ivoire.
