Lauren Groff

A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her. Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. 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.

A Novel

The Vaster Wilds

Emiley Jones

Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a sheet of parchment yet to be written upon.

For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears…

Perhaps the eternal chain of being was not a chain at all but a ring, one life not ending where the other begins but all souls overlapping.

Then this phantom second self blew through her and rose out of her and dispersed into the mist that swallowed her on the cold ground, and she was left alone on the wobbling earth again.

The winter grasses there were dried a crisp silver and new green shoots were coming up, and small yellow and black birds were diving into the grasses and bursting out again, making their invisible stitches in the field.

They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. 

And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.

Yet even in the vision, she found herself yearning for another soul to have spent her life with. Against the resistance of other minds, one's thoughts are pulled out of their comfortable shapes, and true thinking begins. 

And the stones, with their lives so slow that to all impatient moving creatures of animated life they did appear unmoving, but even the stones she understood now did meet and mate, did erupt and splinter, did rub to powder stone upon stone and stone upon water and stone upon air, so that in the long scale of their lives the stones saw within themselves incredible vitality.

Paige Leitner

For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears

Nobleman had died and servants had died; death did not see rank but came for all. 

The Vaster Wilds quotes

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