Lauren Groff is one of the world’s greatest novelists, and Matrix – published two years ago – is further proof of it. I’m always a book behind the times (she published The Vaster Wilds this year, which is probably a masterpiece too).
Matrix imagines a life of Marie de France, sent away from the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine to become prioress of an impoverished, minor abbey, which Marie turns into a mystical religio-feminist utopia. Every word is masterful, every sentence a work of art, and the novel left me feeling alive, scared, and sad. It’s immersive and transcendent.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AN OBAMA'S BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Gorgeous, sensual, addictive' SARA COLLINS 'Brightly lit' NAOMI ALDERMAN
Born from a long line of female warriors and crusaders, yet too coarse for courtly life, Marie de France is cast from the royal court and sent to Angleterre to take up her new duty as the prioress of an impoverished abbey.
Lauren Groff's modern masterpiece is about the establishment of a female utopia.
'A propulsive, captivating read' BRIT BENNETT 'Fascinating, beguiling, vivid' MARIAN KEYES 'A dazzlingly clever tale' THE TIMES 'A thrillingly vivid,…
Scary Monsters is more like two novellas in one, and you can start your reading experience from either cover, meeting at the middle.
You describe the two halves and they couldn’t sound more different – one is set in a near-future dystopian Australia, utterly believable and morally upside-down, and the other in 1980s France, following a young teacher preoccupied with rational and irrational fears.
Yet, not only is each brilliantly written, but taken together they conjure up an intense and unsettling charge, as much about the immigrant experience as about the fragile threads that make up society. I’ve never read anything like it.
'Every page of her story feels charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch; a lurking wallop. It's magnificent, peerless writing' Guardian
'When my family emigrated it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads.'
Michelle de Kretser's electrifying take on scary monsters turns the novel upside down - just as migration has upended her characters' lives.
Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces 'Australian values'. He's also preoccupied by his ambitious wife, his wayward children and his strong-minded elderly mother. Islam has been banned in the…
All our lives are shaped by the things we desire, what happens when we get them and when we don’t, and the loops and patterns we get tangled up in as we do.
In Liz Harmer’s Strange Loops, twins Francine and Philip suffer the after-effects of what each of them feels is the other’s betrayal. It’s a novel about intimacy, sex, faith, acceptance, and it burns and pulses and slithers.
That thing great master sculptors could do, where they could make cold, hard marble look like soft, pliable flesh? Here Harmer does that with words, and it conjures similar feelings of wonder and reflection.
"Enthralling. . . . A story that burns with intensity and daring." —Iain Reid
A propulsive novel about the power and paradoxes of desire, from the acclaimed author of The Amateurs.
As small children, Francine and her twin Philip shared a seemingly unbreakable bond—but in adolescence the connection frayed, and in adulthood the siblings are locked in a repeating loop of complex, destructive emotions. Matters have reached a breaking point, and Francine, now in her thirties and the married mother of two small boys, is convinced that Philip’s teenaged infatuation with religion and subsequent, ongoing obsession with his sister’s “moral…
The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and presents a “passionate, detailed defense of Louis Le Prince…unfurled with all the cliffhangers and red herrings of a scripted melodrama” (The New York Times Book Review). This “fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) presents the never-before-told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.
