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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, 17-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.
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The more I think about this book after I've read it the more I love it. The whole idea around the book felt original and different to a lot of novels I've read recently that deal solely with sad millennial girls or their problems. There was no e of this here. A story of female power in the 12th century, beautifully written as well.
This is one of those books that absolutely blew me away but I have no idea who I would recommend it to - it is so strange, so lyrical, that half the time I felt lost, yet was totally entranced by Groff's writing and immersed in the world of this 12th century French abbey. Marie jumps of the page - you feel her viscerally, and each of the nuns becomes a friend by the last page. I cried, I laughed, I felt anger and fear and dread and joy. If you have the patience, you will find the beating heart of this book and feel all the more alive and human.