Wilderness of Mirrors
Sunday, October 19, 2025 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th NW, Washington DC 20009
Save the date and please join the Cheuse Center, Busboys and Poets and Restless Books for the American Launch of Olufemy Terry's debut novel, 'Wilderness of Mirrors'. Terry will be in conversation with novelist Helon Habila.
About the novel: 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.
“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 loathe to turn away.”
—Evan Narcisse, author, Rise of the Black Panther
“A novel of dreamy indolence and big ideas: When and where will Emil find himself when at last he emerges from the haze of uncertainty, when he decides who and what and where he’s going to be?”
— Kirkus Reviews
“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
“Olufemi Terry’s remarkable debut explores the effects of colonialism, social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.”
— Harare Review of Books
Olufemi Terry is a Sierra Leone–born writer, essayist, and journalist. 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 was an 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 the Arts & Humanities. He is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story “Stickfighting Days.” He lives in Germany and Côte d’Ivoire.
Helon Habila is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University. He is the author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (WW Norton), Measuring Time (WW Norton), Oil on Water (WW Norton), and Travelers (WW Norton). He is the editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story (Granta). His nonfiction book, The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria was published by Columbia Global Reports in 2016. Habila is a contributing editor for The Virginia Quarterly Review and a regular book reviewer for the UK Guardian. He serves on the Cheuse Center's Advisory Board.
More information and eventbrite link to follow.
