Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. Her newest novel, Matrix, gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and ecstasy into a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion and womanhood.
Born from a long line of female warriors and crusaders, yet too coarse, too wild, too rough-hewn for courtly life, Marie de France is cast from the royal court. She is sent to the muddy fields of Angleterre to take up her new duty as the prioress of an impoverished abbey.
The abbey is a dreadful place: its inhabitants are on the brink of starvation, beset by disease, stoic and stern, yet plagued with an unholy tendency to gossip. Marie cannot help but pine for the decadence and comfort of France; her secret lover Cecily, her queen Eleanor, and the very court that had spited her.
Marie soon realizes that, though she may be tied to a life of duty, she wields more power than she could have imagined. With the fearlessness that has always set her apart, she inspires her new sisterhood to awaken their spirits and finally claim what is theirs.
Groff’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic and several Best American Short Stories anthologies. She has won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and the Story Prize; and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orange Award for New Writers and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize among others. In 2017, Lauren was named a Granta Best of Young American Novelist. In 2018, she received a Guggenheim fellowship in fiction and a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.