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Start giftingThe Vaster Wilds
A Novel
Bookseller recommendation
“Such a hypnotizing, atmospheric novel! I loved how the pieces of the narrator's life slowly add up one by one, and how the wilderness is depicted as both menacing and somehow comforting at the same time. Beautifully written and narrated, I highly recommend it! ”
— Marie • Emma's Bookshop
Bookseller recommendation
“Lauren Groff is at the height of her power as a writer. The Vaster Wilds explores how one young woman’s experience of survival defines her. Rich in nuance, gorgeous, and full of the mystery of spirit, this novel meditates on life itself.”
— Deirdre Kidder • Book Passage
Bookseller recommendation
“This thrilling survival story of a girl fleeing a 17th century Virginia colony again demonstrates that Lauren Groff is a literary force of nature. As the girl fights to survive in an unknown, dangerous, yet beautiful wilderness, we learn of the girl’s life in Elizabethan England, and the patriarchy of the colony. Highly recommended! ”
— Mike • A Great Good Place for Books
Bookseller recommendation
“If you’ve ever seen an interview with Lauren Groff, you might think it’s all fun and games with her. But when that woman starts writing, she’s full-tilt serious business. Her new novel, The Vaster Wilds, follows a young servant girl, Lamentations, from the colony of Jamestown as she flees traumatic events in the household where she worked. Did Lauren Groff spend a few months surviving in the woods? That’s the only way I can imagine that she knew the concrete details about how the girl managed for so long on only her ingenuity and instinct. Fear is a mighty motivator, and it was fear of capture that kept Lamentations on the run and fear for her safety that kept me turning the pages. In the end, I was breathless from the journey. ”
— Mamie • Quail Ridge Books
Bookseller recommendation
“Lauren Groff sends us back to the 17th century, to a nascent English fort in the winter somewhere along the North Atlantic Coast beset with starvation and any number of deathly diseases. As the novel opens, our protagonist, a young woman who is escaping this fort with nothing save the clothes on her back, a hatchet, a knife, and a metal cup, descends into the wilderness to try and outrun those who are pursuing her. As we delve into her moment-by-moment hardships we are also thrown into her memories and fantasies of her future, both of which motivate her beyond starvation, pain, exposure, and wild animals which are ever present threats....The farther from the fort she gets, the more she realizes that she never truly had freedoms, that she was always at arms-length from the greater world because of society’s restraints and control over the natural world. Now, in the midst of it, indeed wholly subservient to its whims, she must find a way to coexist - as must we all if we want to commune with the greater truths around existence and who we are. A stunning novel.”
— Jesse • Odyssey Bookshop
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times
"Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe
“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive." —New York Times Book Review
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, and Matrix, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff ’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
