Beautifully written and totally immersed in nature, this is a lyrical, fierce, poetic book about survival. It’s more to absorb the writing than be gripped by a story but very interesting and beautiful.

this was okay, but read a little juvenile and i didn't feel connected to the characters or what happens to them at all. i can see other reader enjoying this a lot tho!

— thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the free digital ARC.

Plot: It is a book in which both nothing and all life happens. That is to say it is a book about survival. Ostensibly it is about surviving the wild but as the reader journeys through with the main character we learn that survival has been at the centre of her life since birth; it is all she has ever done.

Character: Ninety percent of the story we are with the main character, Zed. Though throughout other people from her past and present are described.

Reading Experience: This is a writer's book, not a reader's. You can see the writer enjoying herself on the page, which in itself is a lovely thing. But ultimately, it becomes a slog for the reader to stay the course with her.

Of Note: If you are weak of stomach this book will be a test. Surviving the wilds is not easy and is very often disgusting. There are also some scenes that are genuinely disturbing.

Also, the language which is used to describe "the child Bess" is repeatedly ablest and dehumanising. I tried to keep my mind open as I read the book but I came away at the end not understanding why that choice was made - it didn't reflect the opinion of the main character, for example. So it comes off more that it is a sloppy, ignorant take by the author. But that doesn't feel right either as that wouldn't have been my impression of her before. Whatever it was, read with caution.

Overall: A solid piece of work by a talented writer.

Stars: 3.5⭐

The cover and description of this book really appealed to me but I’m afraid I just couldn’t get into it.The writing is beautiful but nothing really happened and I found it quite boring,I would try another book of hers as the writing was good it was just the story.

The Vaster Wilds is Lauren Groff's fifth novel. There is no plot as such. Essentially the narrative is a journey of escape and self-discovery. The writing is often lyrical, but on occasion rather gory too. Groff leaves a lot unsaid, such as when and where her story is set. Only the reference to the Powhatans, an Indigenous tribe of the Algonquian people of Virginia, allows the reader to deduce the period is sometime during the seventeenth century. In the final third of the novel Groff indulges in some extensive philosophising that yo'yos (sometimes uncomfortably) between fantasy and literary realism. These sections occasionally make the text rather dry and heavy-going. Though completely unintentional, I'm sure, apart from the different location and period this novel bears some uncanny resemblances to Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott. The notion of a character, in a bygone age, fleeing the confines and soldiers of a defensive fort through forests and across rivers in the hope of finding freedom and a better life is clearly an intriguing one for authors.

Many thanks to the publishers and to Netgalley for the ARC.

Alone in the wilderness after fleeing a settlement, a young woman struggles to survive in the frozen conditions as winter clings on in North America. Fearing pursuit by the settlers after an unnamed crime, attack by the indigenous people, and predation by animals, the story of her life and how her predicament has arisen is slowly revealed. The landscape is so vividly described that it is almost a character in the story, as the girl attempts to adapt to her situation and the wilderness resists the changes inflicted by humanity. I was entranced by the atmospheric writing and the need to know both the outcome of the girl's fight for survival and the reasons for her flight. I loved this book and will be recommending it to anyone who will listen!

Groff is a superb story teller and an equally good writer. I was utterly captivated by The Matrix and was delighted to be offered the chance to read The Vaster Wilds. As in The Matrix, she turns to history for inspiration, although this is a very different type of history.

We open with a young girl fleeing from what appears to be a new and failing settlement somewhere in North America. She is being pursued by men from the fort she is running from and also faces the dual threat of hostile natives and the unforgiving and brutal wilds she is travelling through. As she journeys onwards, dealing with all kinds of hardship, she remembers and thinks about the past that led her here.

One of the great tropes of American writing is man against the wilderness. Here, Groff redresses the balance with a female version of that tradition. As well as a meditation on female power, this is an urgent call to think about and address our own complex and toxic relationship with the environment.

There were parts of this book that I absolutely adored and it certainly gripped me from beginning to end. I didn't love it in the same way I loved The Matrix, but it is a strong piece of compelling story telling that hooks you in and holds you.

Lauren Groff has yet again written a supremely immersive book, this time set in the New World when it was literally just that. Set in the early 17th Century, it follows a young girl who is escaping from certain death from starvation, disease or murder if she remains in the besieged stronghold of some early settlers from England. She has been brought there against her will by her mistress and her husband, in order that she can continue in a state of more-or-less slavery to the family and minister to the mentally challenged but lovable daughter. When the daughter dies, the girl is heartbroken, and following a terrible encounter with her mistress's husband, she is forced to flee into the untamed, uncharted wilderness. The narrative follows her determined survival in the face of almost unimagineable horrors and terrors, and is vividly evoked in prose that is slightly archaic to summon the historical setting more believably. The reader finds him- or herself totally engaged with the heroine, for heroine she is, surviving extremes of weather, dreadful sickness, hunger and brushes with wild animals, always hoping she will find a place of safety. I highly recommend this book and this author, for her research and imagination combine to make spellbinding fiction.

I love Lauren Groff's writing, and was (as always) utterly absorbed from the first page. This is a really cbeautifully crafted, carefully told story. The deeper moral reflections on human cruelty and violence, and indifference to our environment, were subtle and gorgeously rendered.

This was my first Groff book, however I have read many others in this genre/with this style of writing. I'm happy to say that it won't be my last Groff book and I would like to explore her other works. I really enjoyed the slightly more 'modern' setting mixed with the lyrical prose. I found it difficult to get into at the start but it picked up from there. I think most of this was getting used to the writing style, as the content and story was actually very entertaining. Once I became familiar with it I enjoyed the book. However I think perhaps this style isn't for me, hence the 3 stars, but I'm going to give her other books a try before deciding this.

This is Lauren Groff’s fifth novel: I have read two of the previous four – “Fates and Furies” (an unreliable narrators take on a modern New York relationship) and “Matrix” (the fictionalised version of the 12th Century poet Marie de France mixed with Eleanor of Aquitaine fanfic).

“Matrix” was a deliberately distanced exploration of Trump-era America – patriarchy and misogyny, untrammeled capitalism, loss of female autonomy, climate change, ecological degradation, even exclusionary walls – with Groff saying she could only explore the society in which she was painfully immersed by removing her protagonists from it by a 100 years or so.

In this book she has decided to perhaps split the gap to the modern day – with a novel set in the 17th Century which examines many of the same ideas by returning to literally the foundational myths of the USA.

The exact setting is 1609-10 Jamestown (the first permanent English settlement in the Americas) at a time of catastrophic famine – the so called “Starving Time”, our protagonist having arrived on one of the hurricane wracked fleet which had meant to be provisioning the settlement (after trading relationships with the local Powhatan people had completely deteriorated into open hostility).

Just an aside – as is briefly mentioned in the book – the biggest ship in the fleet which was carrying all the supplies did not make Jamestown. What is not mention is that the ship was “The Sea Venture” which Admiral Somers had deliberately driven onto reefs in order to save the crew – reefs which proved to be the uninhabited Bermuda and which events lead directly to the founding of that colony (which I have visited frequently) as well as inspiring the writing of the play “The Tempest”.

Returning directly to the novel the female protagonist of the novel is a girl aged somewhere between 16-18, the narrator (a very omniscient one – as I shall later comment) only ever refers to the girl as “her/she” – the girl rejects the various names she has been given such as Zed or Lamentations.

The novel takes place over a couple of weeks as the girl flees Jamestown – a brief change of viewpoint to a ruthless man who is sent to pursue her calls her the “murderess servant” – although we only find out the exact circumstances leading to her flight in the closing parts of the book – and strikes out across the unexplored countryside with an idea to travel north and find a French settlement.

Over time we gradually uncover some details of her life – a foundling in London she was placed around the age of four as a servant with the family of an ageing Goldsmith and his attractive, flirtatious and lustful wife: becoming something of the mistresses plaything (even nicknamed after the mistresses recently deceased pet monkey) taught to perform in the salons she hosted. Her other duty from around a year in – and one she loved – was to care for the couple’s mentally handicapped daughter Bess. After the Goldsmith died of the plague, her mistress seduced and married a sexually charismatic but cruel Minister – sixth son of a Baron, he decides to take his wife and her daughter (with the girl as carer) on the voyage to Jamestown where he is convinced he will make a fortune to rival that his elder brother has inherited but instead finding the catastrophic famine afflicting the settlement.

The actual plot of the book is rather limited and it has to be said relatively repetitive – there are one would think only so many ways to describe: being cold and hungry; catching and part cooking fish, eggs or shellfish; eating berries, moss and mushrooms; trying to take on water; having hurting feet; being dressed in increasingly threadbare rags; having close encounters with predators that decide you are not worth eating; passing thick brown urine and liquid defecation – but it has to be said Groff is as persistent and resourceful in finding those ways as her protagonist is in picking her way north albeit with, it has to be said, the same lack of clear purpose.

All of this threaded through with memory and dreams – and while I am not normally a fan of dreams/visions in books, in this case I think they are crucial to expand the scope of the otherwise overtly narrow scope of the writing. Perhaps this is most effective of all towards the end of the book – when the girl, feverish with what she realises is likely smallpox, imagines how her life might unfold over years and decades ahead if she were to survive.

The protagonists thoughts are rendered in a deliberately period voice – so that early on we are struck by word ordering of sentences such as “the forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees.” Or “quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind”.

Although the thoughts themselves are deliberately I think anachronistic (or at least contrary to what we think of as those of her contemporaries) – with the girl openly conscious of: sexual discrimination, male sexual violence; the ends to which men put religion to support their desires and to justify their need for possession and dominion over landscapes, other species and other peoples and so on.

And, as mentioned above, the novel has a very consciously omniscient narrator who frequently comments on things not known to the narrator, sometimes to make further points showing the limits to the girl’s ingenuity and where even the narrators world view is not sufficiently unprejudiced
Overall this is a distinctive novel – and admirable for the way in which the author can take the ideas and themes of “Matrix” and render them in an ostensibly very different outward form.

A servant girl escapes the famine ridden Jamestown colony and strikes out through the unknown wilderness in hopes of finding the French settlement to shelter her. The entire book is the story of her journey and her amazing struggle for survival. The writing is beautiful and atmospheric, and the story is much more a meditation on strength and hubris than a plot-driven adventure story. I really enjoyed this book, and found it to be a compelling read.

One of the striking, and refreshing, things about Lauren Groff is that she refuses to be tied down by genre. There are one or two of hers that don't work so well but this, I felt, was fascinating and also resolutely non-feelgood. Loved it.

Sadly, I found this super hard to get into and didn't persevere. It felt a bit random and lofty and I was not enjoying it.

Thanks to Net Galley for opportunity to read and review this novel!

A novel of the experiences of an escaped girl from a colonial settlement in the new world trying to survive in a hostile environment.

This world encompasses her personal understanding of everything she meets and how it changes her world view over time. It is so many things: a beautifully written novel; an exhaustive description of everything that happens to her and her responses to them and to her environment physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually; and, a story of her desolate, bleak existence that veers from a simple description of her life, both past and present, through fevered imaginings and actual physical indignities, all the way to mystical realism and an allegory of a changing world.

It can be an uncomfortable read and not for the squeamish. 4 stars!

I hadn't read her previous book - despite seeing it everywhere - so was tempted with this. I really enjoyed it and thought it was really absorbing, completely apart from anything else I am reading. It was visceral and poetic and times, as well as raw and disturbing. It reminded me a little of The Buried Giant by Ishiguro, in terms of her mission across a wilderness in an almost timeless era. I liked the backstory of the current politics though, And that ending!! Well researched and imagined.

An amazing and captivating book, set in the Americas in the early days of British settlement. A girl escapes from a fort where disease and famine are decimating the population. She has only a few important possessions and her wits to help her to survive. This is her story …..
A raw and uncompromising tale about survival in the wilderness and spirituality and the power of human endurance - the story of Zed will stay with me for a long time. Mesmerising and lyrical and so well written. You read this book and wonder, “could I have survived?”

Was so excited for this one! I love Lauren Groff and it was everything I expected and more. Well-written and so compelling,

Another magnificent book from Lauren Groff. I thought this one was even better than Matrix. Once again, it's about a strong woman though actually, she's merely a girl. Despite her slight frame, her weaknesses, her illness, her tiredness, her hunger and her pain, Lamentations struggles onward in the hope of reaching those who may help her.

After running away from the besieged settlement of starving British incomers in the New World, Lamentations fights the wilderness, her fear of the local tribes, wild men, bears and other animals, and her lack of sustenance. She presses on through freezing weather with only her hatchet and knife, two blankets and her flint for fire-making, to keep her alive. Her resourcefulness and determination carry her through the hardships she encounters, with a mixture of luck - good and bad - to keep her going.

This is a beautiful story - beautiful and terrible - intensely written with not a word out of place. The girl grows old in wisdom through her desperate journey. She loses the God of her people but finds something better. Her epiphanies raise this book to a philosophical and spiritual level.

The Vaster Wilds uses the true account of the Jamestown disaster as a jumping off point, showing the ignorance and arrogance of the white settler, the men incapable of adapting to the conditions, the women, as always, subject to the men's whims.

I found this book quite difficult to read but I did love the feeling of loneliness that the author managed to instil in me whilst reading. Beautifully written but I did find the book quite bleak. I love survivor stories but I didn’t feel much happened in this book apart from the FMC trying to stay alive psychologically. Thanks to the author and the publisher for this copy and while I finished the book it was a bit of a slog to keep going, Despite this still giving it 5 stars as it’s written so well and I think so many people are going to enjoy the suffering.