Stephanie Wambugu is the author of Lonely Crowds. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, the winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, a Finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and she was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

"Extraordinary...Wambugu writes with an easy wit, her sentences as approachable as her deeply relatable narrator…it’s the specificity of this young woman’s mind, the contours with which she draws the characters and environments around her, that make Lonely Crowds exceptional…"—The New York Times Book Review

"[An] uncommonly elegant debut novel...” — The Cut

“The debut novel from Stephanie Wambugu makes a compelling case that friendship between girls — that thorny source of envy, love, and obsession — is an eternal narrative wellspring…This is a propulsive story about what it means to grow up with someone.”—Vulture

Lonely Crowds is a devastating coming-of-age novel about envy, disillusionment, and undying devotion that will stay with you long after it ends. — Time Magazine