Matrix (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

by Lauren Groff

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We'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.

This Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition includes 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593539101
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	37,157
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

Hometown:

Gainesville, FL, USA

Date of Birth:

July 23, 1978

Place of Birth:

Cooperstown, NY, USA

Education:

BA English and French Literature, Amherst College, 201: MFA in Fiction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006

Website:

http://www.laurengroff.com

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Matrix:

"Set in early medieval Europe, this book paints a rousing portrait of an abbess seizing and holding power. . .Groff’s trademarkworthy sentences bring vivid buoyancy to a magisterial story." - Kirkus, STARRED review

“Transcendent prose and vividly described settings bring to life historic events, from the Crusades to the papal interdict of 1208. Groff has outdone herself with an accomplishment as radiant as Marie’s visions.” - Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

From the Publisher