Hothouse Bloom

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. 

Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it. 

As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.

Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world. 

Praise for Hothouse Bloom

“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

“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 Redonnet, 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
 

“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 I Heart Oklahoma!

“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 Disrupt the Peace