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.
