A servant girl runs out of the Jamestown fort in the winter of the starving time, with a hatchet, a stolen pewter cup, and two pairs of stockings, into a continent she knows nothing about. That’s the whole book — one girl walking north, foraging, freezing, hiding, sick, with her past in the colony and in London coming back in pieces. Groff writes the physical detail exactly: What a body does without food, how cold gets in, what a fire costs. Underneath is an argument about what the colonists brought with them and why it couldn’t survive contact with the actual land. After this, I’m ready to tee up everything Groff has written.
The Vaster Wilds