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The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Literary fiction

The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

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Quick take

A young servant girl’s escape from a colonial settlement sparks this exploration of imagination, belief, and history.

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    Heavy read

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    Graphic violence

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  • Illustrated icon, Nature

    Nature

Synopsis

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.

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Get an early look from the first pages of The Vaster Wilds.

The Vaster Wilds

I.

The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.

In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.

Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.

Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.

These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.

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Why I love it

I will read anything Lauren Groff writes. Each of her books carry her singular linguistic brilliance while venturing into uncharted terrain, promising new and devoted readers a literary journey like no other. In her new novel, The Vaster Wilds, Groff pulls readers into the fevered dark heart of colonialism, rife with years of sickness and famine as well as European settlers trespassing upon indigenous peoples and one another.

The Vaster Wilds follows an unnamed escaped servant girl on her quest to freedom through the North American wilderness. In Groff’s gifted hands, we experience both the tenderness and violence of nature, and the fortitude of a girl who has little to sustain herself with beyond her faith, courage, and physical stamina—all of which are tested in frightening and exhilarating ways. This is a novel that will hold you by the throat, forcing you to confront what you hold to be true about spiritual survival while guiding you into communion with the mysteries of the natural world.

Lauren Groff is a poet and a master stylist. Her sentences astonish. The Vaster Wilds is a breathtaking adventure story with the beauty and horror of a gothic fairytale, a book for the most passionate lovers of language and the dreamiest of readers who yearn to get lost in the world of another, almost forgotten time.

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Husbands
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
Golden Child
The Goldfinch
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
& Sons
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