Notes From Your BooksellerWe've thought the world of Lauren Groff's work, ever since her hauntingly original debut novel The Monsters of Templeton, the best combination of family saga + ghost story + historical mystery, and she gets better with every book, asking big questions about life and why we do what we do. Fates and Furies put her in front of a whole new set of readers who were dazzled by her indelible characters, prose and insights into marriage and power. Just wait until you pick up her deceptively slim new novel of passion and faith, creativity and power, set in 12th-century France.
A Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition featuring a Q&A with author Lauren Groff and a reading group guide. One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?
Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
