Matrix: A Novel (Unabridged)
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE 2022 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Vulture, Marie Claire, Vox, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more!
“A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today
“An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine
“Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine
“[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times
One of our best American writers, and author of the highly anticipated THE VASTER WILDS, Lauren Groff returns with this exhilarating and groundbreaking novel
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you thought that the lives of nuns were boring, press play on Lauren Groff’s riveting historical drama, which chronicles the fascinating, semi-imagined life of medieval poet and early queer icon Marie de France. Expelled from the French court by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (whom Marie is deeply in love with), Marie is just an awkward, lonely teenager when she arrives at an English abbey. There, she experiences incredible mystical visions—like the one in which Eve and the Virgin Mary are making out in the Garden of Eden!—and builds moving relationships with a colorful cast of nuns. We were thrilled to follow Marie over the course of decades, as she becomes a revered and uncompromising abbess and rides a warhorse in the Crusades. Narrator Adjoa Andoh of Bridgerton fame puts her theatrical voice to brilliant use for Groff’s sweeping tale, transporting us to the 12th-century English countryside.