The Vaster Wilds

By Lauren Groff

Book Overview

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others

"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."--NPR staff pick

"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

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593418395
• ISBN13: 9780593418390
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

I consider Lauren Groff’s THE VASTER WILDS one of my most profound reads of the year.

Lauren Groff’s THE VASTER WILDS renders a mesmerizingly beautiful & anguishing account of an early colonial young woman’s struggling to survive as she flees from a cruel, misogynist, and tragically foolish, English settlement, on the James River, into the wild north woods. Courage & resilience carry her ever onward across a frozen landscape, where she must seek out the tender pockets of life to sustain both mind & body. There’s a magical realism component to the shape and particulars of her journey, and allegorical elements resonant of our 21st century existential climate crisis. Again and again, she overcomes and carry on. Moving ever more deeply into her own dream world, she must weave and re-weave the narrative of her past within her loose hold on her present, and grasp at shifting fragments of possible futures. Groff’s brings her keen observations of the natural world, in all its magnificence and indifference, to bear on the great philosophical questions: is there a god; is there life after death; do animals have souls; must the human race inflict mass cruelty & destruction; what is a human without community? I found this book to be a real page turner, but also one that buffered my plot-driven curiosity with an hypnotic waking dreamscape, as one day melted into another. The novel is a deep pleasure to read, and a well of emotional contemplations.