A new novel from Lauren Groff is coming this summer.
Riverhead Books will publish The Vaster Wilds, Groff’s seventh book, the press announced in a news release.
“Lauren’s newest is a breathtaking, intense, propulsive story of a young girl on the run from a dying Jamestown colony and her quest to survive in the American wilderness,” the publisher said. “This masterwork circles around Groff’s ongoing central concerns: women and power, female survival, how human interaction with nature is driven by the spiritual frameworks that we live within, and specifically how the environmental degradation we’re facing has its roots in the corrosive nature of western religion; different forms and ideas of utopian living; the impossibility of living inside society, and the impossibility too of escaping it.”
Groff made her literary debut in 2008 with The Monsters of Templeton and had a breakout hit four years later with Arcadia, her novel about the residents of a commune in New York state in the 1970s.
Her 2015 novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Three years later, she published the short story collection Florida, which also was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest novel, Matrix, was published two years ago.
Groff announced The Vaster Wilds on Instagram, writing, “I've been working on this one for years and years and am so happy it'll be out in the world soon.”
The Vaster Wilds is slated for publication on Sept. 12.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
