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Lonely Crowds

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What to expect

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.

TIME's 100 Must Read Books of 2025 | Vulture's Best Books of 2025 | New York Magazine's Best Books of the Year

Critics Review

"Lonely Crowds is an artist’s novel of uncommon elegance—a singular portrait of love and guilt and envy, self-discovery and self-deception, struck through with blazing need. Stephanie Wambugu writes with a clerestoried brilliance that throws striking light and strange shadows across her unforgettable narrator Ruth’s traversals of youth, schooling, and becoming. A sensation."—Alexandra Tanner, author of Worry
"Stephanie Wambugu has written a coming-of-age friendship novel for the ages. Her prose and vision are sharp and she writes about art and ambition with a rare combination of frankness and grace."—Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
“A heartstopping debut. This icy flame of a novel distills what it's like to try to become yourself amidst the ravages of faith.”—Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift and The Furrows
“Lonely Crowds is an extraordinary novel filled with a special kind of wisdom and grace: each page a marvel of precision and intimacy that will pull at every strand of your heart.”—Dinaw Menegetsu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air
Author Stephanie Wambugu
Narrator Shayna Small
Duration 9 hours and 50 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781668649381
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Relationships: friends / peer groups
Availability US

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