Lonely Crowds Hardcover | Stephanie Wambugu

Some friendships make you who you are. This becomes considerably more complicated when you’re not sure you like who they made you.

Ruth and Maria meet as girls, two outsiders attending the same Catholic school on scholarship, and quickly form the kind of friendship that becomes less a relationship than an organizing principle. They grow up together, go to college, and eventually find themselves in New York’s early-1990s art world, where being talented is useful but wanting to be talented might be even more consuming. Maria begins to succeed as an artist while Ruth remains caught in her orbit, and the intimacy that once bound them together becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from rivalry, desire, dependence, and ambition. Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds is about art and class and becoming an adult, but mostly it’s about the uncomfortable possibility that loving someone and comparing yourself to them can occupy exactly the same space.

The Details

• Written by Stephanie Wambugu
• Debut novel
• Hardcover
  
• Set partly within New York City’s early-1990s art world
• Explores friendship, obsession, desire, class, ambition + artistic identity
• Named one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
• New York Magazine's Best Books of the Year
• Vulture's Best Books of 2025
• Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
• National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree
  
• Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award + VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
• 304 pages
• Published by Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: July 29, 2025
• ISBN: 9780316581332

About the Author:  Stephanie Wambugu

Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya, grew up in Rhode Island, and now lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University, worked as a bookseller and at the Noguchi Museum while writing Lonely Crowds, and is an editor at Joyland. Wambugu has said the novel began with the voice of Ruth, a middle-aged painter looking back on her life, while Wambugu herself was trying to figure out what it meant to build a life as an artist. Lonely Crowds is her first novel.