LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Set in 1610, after its 15-year-old protagonist has fled a famine- and disease-ridden colony in Virginia (though the historic context is initially withheld to potent effect), Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds is an extraordinarily inventive novel of surviving the wilderness, and striving to find a new way to exist.
The storytelling is vivid and sinewy, nimble as a fairy tale fae navigating a tangled forest, much like the servant girl we meet traversing such terrain by moonlight to escape the deathly colony. While running, she hears voices descending from the snow-speckled sky. Though they chastise her for leaving her mistress, she keeps running until “her skin prickled full of fire”. She fashions a shelter, sparks fire, slips into sleep, but night terrors disturb her: “The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit.”
Through the bitter, biting cold, from cave to close encounters with wild creatures, and through flashbacks to early traumas as an orphan in a poorhouse, her voyage to the New World with her mistress, and life in the colony, the girl’s journey is electrifying. Shot-through with faith, resilience and self-reflective wisdom, The Vaster Wilds is as boldly profound as the best of fables.
Joanne Owen
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The Vaster Wilds Synopsis
A profound and explosive novel about a spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a settlement. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief of everything that her own civilization has taught her.
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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781529152906 |
| Publication date: |
21st September 2023 |
| Author: |
Lauren Groff |
| Publisher: |
Hutchinson Heinemann an imprint of Cornerstone |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
256 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Lauren Groff Press Reviews
I could not stop reading. A haunting, thrilling, gripping and rich. An unputdownable adventure, a mystery and a strange beautiful redemption -- Naomi Alderman
Groff is a mastermind, a masterpiece creator, an intoxicating magician. I wait with impatience for every book and I am always surprised and delighted. The Vaster Wilds feels like her bravest yet, hallucinatory, divine, beyond belief but also entirely human -- Daisy Johnson
Lauren Groff is one of the finest novelists of our age. Her writing is searingly beautiful - delicate and powerful at the same time. The voice of the unnamed girl is haunting and the descriptions of the wild lands are deliciously poetic. The Vaster Wilds first grabs you tenderly and then refuses to let go. It's exquisite, heart-wrenching and utterly mesmerising -- Andrea Wulf
A dazzlingly clever tale . . . gorgeously precise prose, always elegantly weighted and perfectly economical - The Times on MATRIX
Pitch-perfect - Telegraph on MATRIX
Author
About Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, which is the model for Templeton, her novel’s setting. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has won fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Groff’s stories have appeared in prestigious literary publications including The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband.
Author photo © Megan Brown
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