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Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

$28.00 USD
$28.00 USD
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DESCRIPTION

Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world. 
 
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
 
Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHANIE WAMBUGU was born in Mombasa, Kenya in 1998 and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She is an editor of Joyland Magazine. Lonely Crowds is her first novel.

PRAISE

"Extraordinary... Wambugu writes with an easy wit, her sentences as approachable as her deeply relatable narrator… as Ruth grows up and into an independent perspective whose outlines can finally be distinguished from those of the people she grew up with, it’s the specificity of this young woman’s mind, the contours with which she draws the characters and environments around her, that make Lonely Crowds exceptional... Wambugu shows that the state of devotion can be more about the giver than the receiver." — The New York Times Book Review
"[An] uncommonly elegant debut novel... Wambugu’s prose has a propulsive, almost hypnotic drive, and she knows how to keep it moving, getting through about as much time in one book as [Elena] Ferrante does in three... a thrilling and capacious novel about intimacy and art-making in which the narrator proves to be more compelling than her muse." — The Cut

DETAILS

Hardcover | 304 pages

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