Matrix

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.

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, 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.

Editorial Reviews

*06/21/2021

Groff (Florida) fashions a boldly original narrative based on the life and legend of 12th-century poet Marie de France. After Marie is banished to a poverty-stricken British abbey by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine at age 17 in 1158, she transforms from a reluctant prioress into an avid abbess. With the rhythm of days and nights regulated by the canonical hours from Lauds to Prime, from Compline to bed, Marie reshapes the claustrophobic community into a „self-sufficient… island of women,“ where „a woman’s power exists only as far as she is allowed.“ To that end, she confesses a series of 19 beatific visions that guide her in designing an impenetrable underground labyrinth as a secret passageway to the convent, building separate abbess quarters, establishing a scriptorium, and constructing a woman-made lake and dam to insure a constant water supply. Groff fills the novel with friendships among the nuns, inspirational apparitions, and writings empowered by divine inspiration. 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. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Sept.)
– Publishers Weekly

*01/07/2022

On its surface, Groff’s new work is a fairly sharp departure from her last novel, Fates and Furies. Where that earlier work employed a bifurcated story structure to build immense complexity into its narrative of both a marriage and its individual human halves, her latest is an architecturally cleaner effort, fitting for a novel constructed upon the quotidian toil of an early medieval abbess. Taking as its inception the life of Marie de France, a 12th-century Francophone poet about whom materially little is known, this imaginative fiction finds its subject as a 17-year-old cast out of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and made prioress of an impoverished, rural abbey in England. From here, Groff builds her novel around movements in Marie’s life, alternating between acceleration and deceleration, sometimes moving through decades in a short number of pages and in other sequences pausing to plumb certain transformative periods at length, taking advantage of the period setting and language to flex her powers as one of today’s preeminent prose stylists. The result charts a more languorous course than the author’s usual work, but this patient, nonplussed, page-to-page experience belies the novel’s gripping cumulative force. Despite initial appearances, then, Groff’s latest is indeed something of a dual narrative: that of a formidable, ceaseless woman and a powerful sisterhood shaped in her shadow. VERDICT Both epic and intimate, this powerful and sneakily complex record of womankind’s collective strength and industry in a world pitched against them is bolstered by Groff’s rich, fertile prose.–Luke Gorham
– Library Journal

*2021-06-16
Set in early medieval Europe, this book paints a rousing portrait of an abbess seizing and holding power.

After the spicy, structurally innovative Fates and Furies (2015), Groff spins back 850 years to a girl on a horse: „She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.“ The inspiration is a historical figure, Marie de France, considered the first woman to write poetry in French. Groff gives her a fraught, lifelong, sexually charged tie to Eleanor of Aquitaine. A matrix, which comes from the Latin for mother, builds implacably between Eleanor and Marie. But in the first chapter, the queen rids the court of an ungainly, rustic Marie by installing her in a remote English convent, home to 20 starving nuns. The sisters hang the traveler’s clothes in the communal privy, where „the ammonia of the piss kills the beasties“–the lice. After a long sulk, Marie rouses herself to examine the abbey’s disastrous ledgers, mount her warhorse, and gallop forth to turn out the family most egregiously squatting on convent land. News spreads and the rents come in, „some grumbling but most half proud to have a woman so tough and bold and warlike and royal to answer to now.“ The novel is at its best through Marie’s early years of transforming the ruined, muddy convent, bit by bit, into a thriving estate, with a prosperous new scriptorium, brimming fields, and spilling flocks, protected by a forest labyrinth and spies abroad. In this way, Marie forestalls the jealous priests and village men plotting against her. Readers of Arcadia (2012), Groff’s brilliantly evocative hippie commune novel, will remember her gift for conjuring life without privacy. And she knows a snake always lurks within Eden. The cloister witnesses lust, sex, pregnancy, peril. Marie has visions of the Virgin Mary, 19 in all, but these passages stay flat. Medieval mystics, unsurprisingly, write better about mysticism. The gesture toward a lost theology based on Marie’s visions amounts to weak tea.

Groff’s trademarkworthy sentences bring vivid buoyancy to a magisterial story.
– Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Matrix:

„A radiant novel about the 12th-century poet and mystic Marie de France. . . Groff richly imagines Marie’s decades of exile in a royal convent, which she eventually leads. A charged novel about female ambition.“ – Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

„Just when it seems there are nothing but chronicles of decline and ruin comes Lauren Groff’s Matrix, about a self-sufficient abbey of 12th-century nuns–a shining, all-female utopian community… it is finally its spirit of celebration that gives this novel its many moments of beauty.“ -Wall Street Journal

„[T]hrilling and heartbreaking. Groff. . . crafts an electric work of historical fiction.“ -TIME

„[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her. “ – New York Times Book Review

„Far more than a treat for history buffs. . . . [Groff] writes a creative, intelligent work that will last.“ – Boston Globe

„Incandescent. . . a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment.“ -Esquire

„In Lauren Groff’s hands, the tale of a medieval nunnery is must-read fiction.“ -The Washington Post

„Stunning . . .grand, mythic . . .feels both ancient and urgent, as holy as it is deeply human.“- Entertainment Weekly

„An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.“ – O, The Oprah Magazine

„An inspiring novel that truly demonstrates the power women wield, regardless of the era. It has sisterhood, love, war, sex …[Q]uite impossible to put down.“ – NPR

„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 or Robert Caro’s Robert Moses.“- USA Today

„The medieval nun drama you didn’t know you needed.“ -Vulture

„A bold new direction for the accomplished writer.“- Vogue

„[I]n an appealingly unpredictable move, Lauren Groff has turned her attentions to 12th-century English nuns. The result is a highly distinctive novel of great vigour and boldness … we are carried on the force of her style, and held by the strength of an intelligence that lets comedy and emotional complexity work together … an assertively modern novel about leadership, ambition and enterprise, and about the communal life of individuals.“- The Guardian

„Transcendently beautiful … It’s surprisingly delicious to read fiction about a historical figure we know so little about.“ -Shondaland

„A propulsive, enchanting, and emotionally charged read.“ -Washington Independent Review of Books

„A mesmerizing study of faith, passion and violence.“- Harper’s Bazaar

„Sumptuous, sublime . . engrossing.“- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

„Expansive . . . . passionately feminist, funny and even a bit profane.“- Good Housekeeping

„This transportive and meditative tale that will swallow you up from the very start.“ – Newsweek

„A premier stylist, [Groff] continues to grow….The voice she finds for Marie de France…will hold readers fast.“ – Los Angeles Times

„Mesmerizing . . . . A bold, thrilling work that highlights the wild, wide range of Groff’s imagination.“ – Minneapolis Star-Tribune

„Groff’s . . . most daring work to date. . . . sumptuous but brisk storytelling mines the Dark Age abbey for veins of violence, humor, empowerment, and spirituality and forges something compelling, strange, and recognizable to modern eyes.“ – Philadelphia Inquirer

„An unforgettable vision.“ – Tampa Bay Times

„Both epic and intimate, this sweeping novel explores questions of female ambition, creativity and passion with electrifying prose and sparkling wit. A propulsive, captivating read.“-Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half

„An audacious piece of storytelling, full of passion, wisdom and magic.“ -Sarah Waters, New York Times bestselling author of The Paying Guests

„A thrillingly vivid, adventurous story about women and power that will blow readers’ minds. Left me gasping.“ -Emma Donoghue, author of Room

„Luminous, divine, her masterpiece.“-Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

„Matrix is alive with lust and glory. In the incandescent Marie de France – visionary, cantankerous and uncowed by the constraints of her sex – Groff paints a portrait of sisterhood that shines out of the past and into the lives of women today.“-C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

„Groff has created a labyrinth of jewel-like moments . . . and transformed it into a novel that is perfect for right now.“-BookPage, STARRED review

„Splendid with rich description and period vocabulary, this courageous and spine-tingling novel shows an incredible range for Groff (Florida, 2018), and will envelop readers fully in Marie’s world, interior and exterior, all senses lit up. It is both a complete departure and an easy-to-envision tale of faith, power, and temptation.“ – Booklist, STARRED review

„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