Hothouse Bloom

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.