Angela Flournoy , critically acclaimed author of The Turner House , joined The Center For Fiction to celebrate the highly anticipated release of her new novel, The Wilderness .

The Wilderness follows five Black women in their twenties—Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia—as they wrestle with profound questions reverberating through their lives: How do we reconcile the search for purpose and direction with the shifting stakes of maturity? How should friendship be prioritized in the face of these transformations? Set against the backdrops of New York and Los Angeles from the late 2000s through the 2020s, the novel navigates the uncertain metamorphosis of contemporary adulthood.

Flournoy was joined in conversation by Brit Bennett , author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Vanishing Half , and Raven Leilani , author of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize -winning book Luster . Don’t miss this intimate exploration of modern connection and coming of age.

Angela Flournoy: Money is real. And I think that a lot of people talk about how fiction and novels historically are supposed to be for the middle class. And I’m not supposed to do this and they’re not supposed to do that. That might be historically, like a century ago, who the target audience was for these books, but I read the same books and I did not come from that.

Plenty of us are broke. But we also think about a lot of other things. We just don’t want to pick up the check at the end of the meal.

And it never occurred to me that in my fiction, I was supposed to not talk about money or conversely, make money—not having money—the sole characteristic of a person, because there’s that. Like that’s always been in fiction—it’s like a person can be broke, but that’s got to be the only thing they ever think about.

They can’t ever have any other concerns because they gotta find money. And I feel like that’s not—plenty of us are broke. But we also think about a lot of other things. We just don’t want to pick up the check at the end of the meal. So I wanted to make that something that felt present.

But also one of the things when I was thinking about how my friendships are going to evolve, I also was thinking about individually, this generation of people for whom the future—the future that our parents in their 30s and 40s had—is not guaranteed at all. Right. How is that person just living with precarity of a different kind?