288pp., paperback, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2026

ISBN: 9781837266432

Winner of the 38th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards' Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

The decades-long friendship between Ruth and Maria - two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and move to glamorous 1990s New York to chase dreams in the art world - begins to rupture under the weight of ambition and rivalry.

"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" New York Times Book Review

"Masterful, thoughtful ... In short, blunt sentences, the book devastatingly portrays the realities of money, race, sexuality, ambition - long with the gossipy competitiveness of any insular scene - that both Ruth and Maria confront in New York ... one of the most emotionally and intellectually rich debuts I can remember reading in this or any year" Boston Globe

Stephanie Wambugu was born in 1998 in Mombasa, Kenya, and grew up in Rhode Island. She completed an MFA at Columbia University and lives in NYC, where she works as an editor of Joyland Magazine. Lonely Crowds is her first novel.

LONELY CROWDS

: Wambugu (S.)

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