The Vaster Wilds

In the brutal winter of 1610, a teenage servant girl escapes the starving James Fort colony in Virginia with a hatchet, a pewter cup, and a stolen pair of boots. She heads north into the wilderness with no map and no plan, hunted by colonists who want her returned, by Powhatan men who watch her pass, and by the cold and hunger that close around her as the weeks accumulate. Groff writes the entire novel as a single sustained survival quest, building the colonial frontier from a single girl's body against the continent in an incantatory, biblical register that critics have compared to McCarthy's The Road.