"This raw, brutal, unconventional story of a girl on-the-run in the wilderness in the 17th-century New World boasts formidable fairy-tale atmosphere and a potent spirit of survival."
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.
| Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Exhilarating' GUARDIAN
'Her writing has a timeless quality' THE TIMES
'[Has] a visionary quality' OBSERVER
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.
The Vaster Wilds features in the following genres: Historical Fiction, Historical adventure fiction, Fiction, Action Adventure, Star Books, Recommendations, Audiobooks of the Month
The Vaster Wilds is available in Paperback, Hardback, Audiobook
The Vaster Wilds was written by Lauren Groff and published by Penguin Books an imprint of Cornerstone
The Vaster Wilds has 256 pages
£8.99
