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.

Groff has been a favorite author at NUBClub, and this novel didn't disappoint; no one was less than slight positive on this work and a few of us loved it. Everyone was a bit surprised at the speed of the novel. Groff moves quickly through the highlights of Marie's life and a few of us would have loved to have more time in Marie's childhood when she was pretending to be her mother running her family estate or seeing the community of nuns in their daily life in more detail. That said, everyone found the analysis of the politics of Marie's reign as prioress complex and engaging, and in particular, we enjoyed the story as an analysis of the way Marie and Eleanor (as Marie's foil) cultivated and held power. As a vision of what a society of women isolated from the world could do, it was an interesting piece of utopian fantasy. Of course, one of the strengths of Groff's writing is the complex ambiguities that exist in ordinary relationships, and that created some of the most compelling moments of the story, from Marie's relationships with Ruth or Goda or Wulfhild (Wulfhild and Marie's friendship was particularly beautiful arc) to the lesbianism that sits unspoken in the nunnery to the careful negotiations between Marie and Eleanor that extend throughout their lives. Groff is just masterful at quickly creating a world of characters and making the negotiations between them clear and striking. We also spent a long time talking about Marie's visions and what their relations were her power and her initiatives. There's an interesting interplay between the dictates and trappings of faith and the individual needs of accomplishment, work, and pride that we spent a lot of time unpacking. And the novel landed very well, with a fascinating internal deliberation and sudden decision by Tilde that reframed the message of the entire novel, although we debated passionately what that message was. We can't say this is Groff's best work (Fates and Furies is just incredible), but all of us had a lot to say and a lot to debate in this small and quick novel. It's a interestingly complex fantasy of women and independence that's worth a read.