The Vaster Wilds is a remarkable book. It somehow manages to be both harrowing and uplifting at the same time.

I had read one of Lauren Groff’s previous books, Matrix, and liked it well enough. But The Vaster Wilds is in a different league. It starts with urgency, suffering, and wonder, and that combination never lets up for the whole book.

The plot is decepetively simple. A servant girl escapes a starving colony in 17th century America—probably Jamestown—and runs through the woods in wintertime, desperate to survive. That’s pretty much it. But in that journey is all of life; nature red in tooth and claw, humanity even redder, and the transcendental power of the living landscape.

The descriptions of the protagonist’s inner world are just as vivid as the details of the forests, rivers, and mountains. The prose fairly sings with joy at a minor pleasure and then wails in woe at a horrifying brutality, often in the same paragraph.

It isn’t always an easy read. But it is always completely true to itself.