The Vaster Wilds Audiobook By Lauren Groff cover art

The Vaster Wilds

A Novel

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The Vaster Wilds

By: Lauren Groff
Narrated by: January LaVoy
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About this listen

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others

"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick

“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times

“Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe

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.

©2023 Lauren Groff (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Historical Fiction Fiction Wilderness Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Inspiring
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Critic reviews

“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose.”—New York Times Book Review

“[A] thrilling historical adventure. . .the existential themes at the heart of Lauren Groff’s fifth novel—the rawness of life, the precious inner-workings of nature, the drive to continue on in the face of challenges—are as timely as they come.”TIME

"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR

Dear Listener,

What inspired me to write this story?
"In 2013, I was leafing through the Smithsonian Magazine in some long-forgotten waiting room when I saw a story that caught my eye, and then the whole of my attention. It was a graphic depiction of what the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in the New World—suffered through the awful winter of 1609-1610. As a result of the torments of famine, bad water, social strife, a siege by the understandably angry Indigenous people around them, and horrendous illnesses (different poxes and fluxes and fevers), researchers had discovered proof that the settlers resorted to eating fellow humans. This was the first seed of my novel—this all-body horror—and it sat latent in me until at last I understood that I wanted to write a much larger story about survival, religion, nature, god, and ecstasy. It took a decade, but that seed became The Vaster Wild." – Lauren Groff, writer of The Vaster Wilds