Lauren Groff

One of our best American writers, 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, 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.

Matrix

Johannes Ecker

abi a

 The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English. In a thousand more years humans will be as thoughtless as the cud-chewing kine of the fields. She longs to be among the greats of the generations before. Marie might have discovered others like herself in that era. She would not have felt so alone.

Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability. 

For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable of women. How short and lonely Gytha's life would have been, an isolate lost in the cruelty of the secular world. How much less beauty she would have brought into this flawed and difficult life if she had been forced to be without her sisters who loved her. It is good, Marie thinks, so very good, this quiet life of women and work. She is amazed she ever resisted it so angrily.

Piper Loyd

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand. 

Emiley Jones

It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so.

Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer.

So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

Then she rose and stared out the open window at the garden in its cloak of fog, feeling the sun go down inside her. 

For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire. 

…she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to God—not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil—but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.

How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life. 

Matrix quotes

Join the club