The Vaster Wilds

During the catastrophic winter at Jamestown, a young servant girl flees the English settlement and enters the unfamiliar forests of Virginia alone. She carries little food or equipment and must improvise shelter, cross rivers, evade pursuit and endure hunger, injury and exposure. Her flight is driven by immediate danger, but the farther she travels from the colony, the more completely she is forced to reconsider the religious assumptions, social commands and imperial claims through which she has understood the world.

The novel is set in 1610, at the end of Jamestown’s Starving Time, when famine, disease, isolation and conflict had devastated the settlement. Groff presents survival from the perspective of a vulnerable servant rather than a celebrated colonial leader, making the wilderness journey an examination of faith, conquest and the violence embedded in English settlement. The book combines historical adventure, psychological suspense and exploration-and-survival fiction while treating colonial Virginia as a contested Indigenous landscape rather than an empty frontier.