Groff, Lauren

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies: A Novel, Arcadia, and The Monsters of Templeton, and the short story collection Florida, among others. She has won the Story Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In Matrix: A Novel (Riverhead Books), 17-year-old Marie de France is cast from the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine to be the prioress of an impoverished English abbey where the nuns are on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. Facing the challenges of her new life, Marie steadily supplants her desire for a family, homeland, and the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters and a conviction in her own divine visions. The last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, Marie is determined to chart a boldly different course – for the women she now leads and protects, and for herself. “Groff has outdone herself with an accomplishment as radiant as Marie’s visions,” said Publishers Weekly, praising what is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.