The Vaster Wilds

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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.

'Exhilarating' GUARDIAN
'Her writing has a timeless quality' THE TIMES
'[Has] a visionary quality' OBSERVER

©2023 Lauren Groff (P)2023 Penguin Books Ltd

Critics Review

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
There is something exhilarating about this novel, a velocity of ambition . . . Groff is not lost in the forest. She knows exactly where she is going
Guardian
Her writing has a timeless quality . . . [Groff] has a nose for moments of transcendent, almost holy natural beauty
The Times
Another September title that we've been desperately waiting for— Lauren Groff, author of Matrix is back, with an electrifying new novel set in early colonial America; seventeenth century Jamestown, to be precise. A servant girl is working for her mistress who has a disabled daughter. She is devoted to the family but then abruptly leaves, heading into the wilderness, with just a few items and a spiritual spark inside of her. This is the start of the servant girl's journey — an utterly thrilling adventure in which she discovers the world around her and tries to find a different way to live in the face of colonialism. Written in Goff's trademark visceral prose, this haunting book will stay with you long after you've finished it. Fact
Glamour
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
As always, Groff’s prose is finely worked, with a poet’s eye for imagery (a porcupine walks “his bristles through the undergrowth with the weary pomp of a crowned prince”) and a visionary quality that recalls Matrix
Observer
Groff writes in prose that sparkles . . . this beautifully written, soulful book is partly a fable and partly a treatise on greed: an exhortation for mankind to be satisfied with his lot, something we would all do well to heed
Spectator
Of the many distinctions of this rich and visionary novel, perhaps the greatest is its prose. The Vaster Wilds presents us with a powerful alternative vision of the settlement of America: one not of a struggle between civilisation and savagery, in which European men felt “a need to set their boots upon everything they saw”, but of a resourceful young woman working with nature to establish a new life. Barack Obama picked two of Groff’s previous books — Fates and Furies in 2015 and Matrix in 2021 — as his novels of the year. It would be no surprise if The Vaster Wilds made it a third
Financial Times
Groff’s prose is anointed with an agitated, near transcendent intensity…In setting her alongside the likes of Hernan Diaz, and his Pulitzer Prize- winning Trust (2022), Groff’s books makes her one of an exciting new generation of American novelists who are using fiction to rewrite the founding myths of the so- called Land of Liberty
Sunday Telegraph

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