Hothouse Bloom - Paperback

by Austyn Wohlers (Author)

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize - Indie Next Pick, September 2025 - A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from The Millions, Debutiful, Garden & Gun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Hailed as "beautiful and strikingly original" by the New York Times, Hothouse Bloom is a modern-day pastoral about art, solitude, and self.

In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather's apple orchard. She succeeds, for a time, but her idyll is interrupted by an old friend's arrival and the hard demands of turning a profit. As the outside world invades in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists, what had begun as a renunciation becomes a new obsession, consuming her much the way an apple might oxidize and rot. Painterly, strange, and razor-sharp, Hothouse Bloom announces Austyn Wohlers as a singular new talent in American fiction.

Author Biography

Austyn Wohlers was born in Atlanta in 1996. Her other writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Massachusetts Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is also a musician, releasing music alone and with the band Tomato Flower. Hothouse Bloom is her first book.