Books & Bites! Angela Flournoy with Vallery Lomas

This is a ticketed event! Tickets include a hardcover copy of Angela's book "The Wilderness" that she will sign and personalize after the event.

Angela Flournoy will be joined by her longtime friend, cookbook author and current America’s Test Kitchen Editor in Residence, Vallery Lomas, for a conversation about The Wilderness and a sampling of culinary treats.

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

Named a most anticipated book by New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, People Magazine, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Hub

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York.

Vallery Lomas is the winner of ABC’s Great American Baking Show, and the author of cookbook ‘Life Is What You Bake It,’ an Eater, Publisher's Weekly, Thrillist, Glamour, Food Network Magazine (and more) "Best of 2021" cookbook. She has appeared on numerous morning shows, including Today and Good Morning America, and provided commentary for the History Channel show, The Food That Built America, for the last 6 seasons. She is an editor-in-residence at America’s Test Kitchen, a Wall Street Journal columnist, and a New York Times Cooking contributor. Originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Vallery practiced law in New York City for 8 years before starting her career as a baker and food personality.

Host or Publisher Baldwin & Co.