I’m going to cast you away to a desert island. How long do you think you’ll last? Perhaps you could fashion a fishing line from a palm frond and live in barbecued splendour. Or build a shelter from nothing but banana leaves and your own saliva. Beyond the Desert Island Discs studio, these kind of fantasies rarely trouble the centrally heated, supermarket-sated, 21st-century imagination, but if you read Lauren Groff’s new novel, you might find yourself wondering. The Vaster Wilds is a 259-page survival story. How long would yours be?
The novel takes place not on a desert island but in the icy, beast-crawling forest outside Jamestown, Virginia at the dawn of the 17th century. Starvation, smallpox and the darker impulses of the hunger-wrecked human
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