Pitched for fans of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all human attachments to merge her consciousness with her late grandfather’s apple orchard, only to see her idyll collapse as she must face her neighbor’s hardships, the tumultuous reapparance of an old friend, and the compulsions of ownership and profit.
Forthcoming August 26, 2025.
For galleys and press, contact Meg at Hub City: meg@hubcity.org
Finalist for the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Prize
Winner of the 2022 Sparks Prize Fellowship, selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Read more/Preorder at Hub City Press
“With its euphonious investigation of the ever-shifting borderline between the existential and the mystical, Hothouse Bloom immediately establishes Austyn Wohlers as a vital and extraordinary wellspring of the divine. Akin in turns to Reddonet, Lispector, and Tarkovsky, hers is the rare kind of debut that resets the bar for the field at large, convalescing fervent depth and resolve where it’s gone missing underneath the wearying veneer of our everyday.”
— Blake Butler, author of Molly
“Hothouse Bloom begins inside a fog, and though this fog, in which violence may or may not have occurred, eventually lifts, its memory lingers throughout the novel—quietly, calmly, and uneasily. I had the impression reading this novel that I was viewing an impressionist painting, or occupying the liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. I did not want to break my gaze, or to wake up.”
—Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, author of Names for Light
"Phenomenally talented and exquisitely attuned to the missed apprehension, the dusting of rot suggesting blight, the inexpressible yearning for transmutation that collapses under its own compromised avidity, Austyn Wohlers has crafted a lush and slightly deranged pastoral, like a shoegazing post-feminist Blithedale Romance, as vivid in its commitment to affect as it is lacerating in its sophistication. Hothouse Bloom reverberates, unfolds, turns fractal, and breaks again and again, tracing the keen edge of consciousness where desire and repulsion merge. A beautiful, bountiful, and harrowing debut."
— Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“Written with the intensity of Clarice Lispector and the early work of Elena Ferrante, Austyn Wohlers’s Hothouse Bloom is a courageous satire of an idealistic artist turned ruthless capitalist. A thrilling and fevered examination of friendship, ambition, and obsession, Hothouse Bloom announces the arrival of a singular and important new voice in literature.”
— Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disturb the Peace