Young adulthood might be a more uncertain period than ever before.

With so many more options, it can seem like everyone is on a different path in the period between 20 and 40 years of age as they navigate the buffet of choices that make a life. Some young adults are in cities, trying to make it at a big kid job while looking for love, while others are leaving those very same cities in search of family and stability.

“The Wilderness,” by Angela Flournoy explores how these various pathways affect one group of friends. The incisive, idealistic novel comes a decade after “The Turner House,” Flournoy’s debut at just 30 years old. It won a host of accolades and, notably, was a National Book Award finalist.

Her second novel follows five Black women — Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia — over the course of their 20-year friendship, from 2007 to 2027. The book moves between perspectives, coasts and decades of the women’s lives, chronicling their relationships, motherhood, careers and more.

Loss and heartbreak interrupt what is often idealized as a carefree period in a young person’s life. But at the same time it’s a period accompanied by lot of pressure to “become,” whatever that means — perhaps a chef like Nakia, an influencer like Monique, a parent like January or not much of anything at all, like Desiree, who feels she has “failed to launch.”

The novel opens with Desiree guiding her grandfather through his final days without the help of her estranged sister Danielle. Caring for him over the years after the death of their mother when they were children meant that Desiree, 22, and now an orphan, was wholly without a plan for her future.

Desiree floats across the country from L.A., a city not the same without her grandfather, to New York. “In New York she’d found herself reaching for pastimes and postures that had nothing to do with who she actually was. Untethered.” There, she finds that a new coast alone isn’t enough to make herself whole.

She befriends Nakia and, by extension, January and Monique. Without a family of her own, the importance of chosen family shines through in the novel.