WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Oct 19, 2025 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Oct 19, 2025 6:00 pm
14th & V
Exquisitely written and deeply absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize-winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in a country still reeling from the lasting effects of racial partition and colonialism.
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.
Olufemi Terry is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside novelist Helon Habila to celebrate the release of this debut novel, and dive deeper into Terry’s characters and “the gaps their country's history has left” (Evan Narcisse, author, Rise of the Black Panther). Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Terry will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Olufemi Terry is a Sierra-Leone born writer, essayist and journalist living in Germany and Cote d'Ivoire. His short fiction has been published in The Georgia Review, Guernica, 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 has been the 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 Washington DC Arts & Humanities Grant. A former juror of the Miles Morland Scholarship and the AKO Caine Prize for African writing, he is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize.
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.
BOOK DETAILS
Wilderness of Mirrors
By Olufemi Terry
September 09, 2025 | Paperback, 256 pages, $17.00
