Diane Cook’s debut novel is poised to be one of the biggest books of the season.
We’ve got your exclusive first look.
Now EW has an exclusive first look.
Credit: Harper
This means living the city they’ve always called home, and searching for refuge far, far away.
Their bond is tested in remarkable ways.
Publishing Aug. 11,The New Wildernessis primed to make a literary splash.
Read the first excerpt from the book below, andpre-order it here.
Around her, the singular song of crickets expanded.
Beas skin prickled from heat.
Sweat dried on her back and face.
The sun had crested and would, more quickly than seemed right, fall again.
From where Bea knelt, she saw their Valley, its secret grasses and sage.
The Caldera stood sharp and white on the horizon.
She scooped the placenta into it.
The hole was shallow and her babys belly jutted from it.
Now, the animals, who had sensed it, were converging.
She heard the soft tread of coyotes.
They wove through the bloomy sage.
A mother and three skinny kits appeared under jaggedly thrown shade.
Bea heard whines ease from their impassive yawns.
A wind stirred and she breathed in the dusty heat.
Shed hated the feeling.
So exposed, used, animal-like.
But here, it was all dust and hot air.
Here, she had needed to guide the small bodyhad she been five months pregnant?
Seven?out with one hand while with the other shed had to block a diving magpie.
She had wanted to be alone for this.
What she wouldnt have given for her mother.
Bea hissed at the coyotes.
Scram, she said, pitching the dirt and pebbles shed just dug at them.
Its what mothers did.
The truth was Bea hadnt wanted the baby.
It would have been wrong to bring her into this world.
Thats what shed felt all along.
But what if the girl had sensed Beas dread and died from not being wanted?
This is for the best, she told her.
The girls eyes clouded over with the clouds that rolled overhead.
She clapped her hands to scare the eyes, but they just dipped down.
The animal was tall but crouching, sitting perhaps, and Bea feared it was stalking her.
Her inner sense of being in danger.
But the feeling never came.
Again the eyes dipped down, supplicant, like a dog obeying, but it was not a dog.
The deer heaved up and then the quivering eye wobbled up too.
It was a small glistening fawn, on shaky, toothpick legs.
Bea had unknowingly witnessed a birth.
Quiet in the dark.
Bea had come stealthily upon the mother like a predator.
And the mother could do nothing in that moment but lower her head as though asking to be spared.
It was the only moment they would have together.
She did not want to share that.
She did not want someone watching her own complicated version of grief.
Bea peered at the coyote mother.
You understand, dont you?
The coyote pranced impatiently and licked her yellow teeth.
She had to leave.
The sun was going.
And now the wolves knew.
She stood, stretched out her sand-pocked knees, wiped the desert off her skin and ragged tunic.
She felt foolish that shed tried to resuscitate what she knew to be dead.
She thought the Wilderness had cast all sentimentality from her.
She would not tell anyone about that moment.
Not Glen, who she thought wanted a child of his own more than he would ever admit.
No, she would stick to the simple story.
The baby did not survive.
So many others hadnt.
So we move on.
She turned without another look at this girl she had wanted to name Madeline.
She gave that mother coyote a sharp kick, landing it against her visible ribs.
Bea heard the scuffle and yips behind her.
**
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