The Vaster Wilds
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Groff's extraordinary latest (after Matrix) tracks the life of an adolescent servant girl who flees a Jamestownesque settlement in colonial America and sets out across the wilderness. Traveling in winter, the unnamed narrator sustains herself by hunting and gathering. Despite the harsh conditions, she delights in the natural scenery, which Groff depicts with wrenching beauty ("she saw in the dim and silvery light the wind lifting lighter snow and sculpting it into a shining city with rooftops and chimneys and a steeple and even the smoke of fires merrily ascending from the chimneys toward heaven"). Through the girl's memories, the reader learns she was adopted at four from a parish poorhouse in England by a well-off woman and her husband and was tormented by the couple's older son. Several years later, the husband dies and the woman marries an ambitious minister. They force the girl to accompany them to the New World and care for their newborn baby. The colony turns out to be a godforsaken place wracked by illness, lack of food, and violent confrontations with Indigenous people. There are many exciting episodes—the narrator encounters a bear, a wolf, and an unruly former Jesuit priest who also subsists in the wild—and the staggering ending reveals the details surrounding her escape. Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine's desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.
Customer Reviews
Prose poetry
3.5 stars
The author is a multi-award winning American fiction writer and favourite of the critics. Her last novel ‘Matrix’ (2021) was about an illegitimate teenage girl in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (a big name in 12th century Europe), who is dispatched to set up a nunnery in England. It was excellent, and not just because of Ms Groff’s skills as a writer.
This time at bat, the setting is the Jamestown, Virginia in the early 1600s. The embattled British colonial outpost is on its last legs due to starvation, disease, and attack by Native Americans. A teenage servant girl takes off into the titular wilds to escape the horror, the full details of which we don’t learn till the end. She is pursued for a while by a soldier from the colony, dodges the Indians, and exhibits survival skills worthy of Bear Grylls.
The descriptions are richly detailed, the metaphors both plentiful and inventive, which is handy because there’s not much in the way of plot apart from flashbacks to the protagonist’s previous life, and the relentless battle to stay alive.
Ms Groff is a writer worth reading for her prose. If you’ve not read anything by her before, I suggest you start with ‘Fate and Furies’ (2015). Despite the overtones on Greek tragedy implied by the title, it is set in the late 20th century.