Book Discussion: "Matrix" by Lauren Groff

This month, the Park Slope Library's adult book discussion group is reading "Matrix" by Lauren Groff.

Named Top Ten book of 2021 by the Washington Post and a best book of the year by over two dozen newspapers and magazines, including TIME, The Guardian, The Financial Times, the Spectator, The Times, Library Journal, and Esquire.

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.

 

If you are looking for a good book or a book discussion set for your own book group, click this link  for some great recommendations.