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.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

AN INKY INVESTIGATION Cast yourself into the world of witches as Qifrey chases after the dark mysteries of the Brimmed Caps! With some quick thinking and ingenuity, Coco and her fellow classmates use their growing magic skills to save some locals from a grim fate. But this triumph nearly turns to tragedy as the Knights Moralis threaten the young witches with severe punishment for disturbing the natural order of magic. Qifrey convinces the Knights to overlook this issue, but a peculiar happening related to this incident puts him onto the trail of the same forbidden magic that brought Coco into his atelier. This may be Qifrey's only chance to come into contact with the Brimmed Caps, but is he in over his head to engage in this treacherous pursuit on his own?

AN INKY INVESTIGATION Cast yourself into the world of witches as Qifrey chases after the dark mysteries of the Brimmed Caps! With some quick thinking and ingenuity, Coco and her fellow classmates use their growing magic skills to save some locals from a grim fate. But this triumph nearly turns to tragedy as the Knights Moralis threaten the young witches with severe punishment for disturbing the natural order of magic. Qifrey convinces the Knights to overlook this issue, but a peculiar happening related to this incident puts him onto the trail of the same forbidden magic that brought Coco into his atelier. This may be Qifrey's only chance to come into contact with the Brimmed Caps, but is he in over his head to engage in this treacherous pursuit on his own?