TERRY, Olufemi
Wilderness of Mirrors

When his father suggests he take time off to visit estranged relatives, Emil—a young surgeon-in-training—sets aside his studies and, for reasons he doesn’t yet understand, moves to Stadmutter, a multiracial city at the southern tip of Africa. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by his encounters with Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German who woos him intellectually and sexually, and with Tamsin, a PhD student working to define herself against her country’s shifting cultural hierarchies. Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. As Bolling’s covert support for an upstart Creole movement threatens decades of racial progress, Emil is drawn increasingly toward exile.

Exquisite and absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize–winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in an Africa still reeling from the lasting effects of colonialism and racial Partition. [publishers’ note]

Published by Les Fugitives, 2026
Literature