Never underestimate a visionary. When Eleanor of Aquitaine decrees Marie de France will be sent to an impoverished abbey in England, Marie is shocked and desperate to get back in Eleanor’s good favor. But as she gets used to life with the nuns, she finds she has much to give as prioress and that includes her own divine revelations. Marie takes protecting her fellow nuns seriously, no matter how the world changes around them. An urgent exploration of religion, power, and sexuality.

I read this book pre-release, before anyone I knew had read it, with zero expectations or preconceived notions and it blew me away. Propulsive, urgent, honest, transportative, evocative, powerful—all the adjectives apply. The plot doesn't sound terribly exciting—a servant girl escapes a Jamestown-like colonial settlement and tries to survive on her own in the wilderness until she can make her way to something resembling safety—but WOW. This very interior novel hews to the perspective of one young woman, but Groff has more up her sleeve. This is also a bigger story about colonial America and how we as people live with each other and move through the world, and how our actions are dominos that have consequences we do not and cannot anticipate. I finished this book and couldn't wait to talk about it with my fellow readers. I even spoiled it for my husband (with permission) because I had big thoughts I needed to get off my chest. All the stars.

Entertainment Weekly calls this "a moving look at the value of human connection in a scary, chaotic world."

From the publisher: "Every story has two sides. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation."

This is the debut by Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies. From Publishers Weekly: "Wilhelmina Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, N.Y., after a disastrous affair with her professor during an archeological dig in Alaska. Willie's shocked to find that her mother, Vi, has found religion. Vi also reveals to Willie that her father wasn't a nameless hippie from Vi's commune days. With only the scantiest of clues, Willie is determined to discover her father's identity. Brilliantly incorporating accounts from generations of Templetonians—as well as characters borrowed from the works of James Fenimore Cooper—Groff paints a rich picture of Willie's current predicaments and those of her ancestors."

Lauren Groff has already written three bestselling novels (one of which Barack Obama chose as his favorite novel of the year in 2015). More than ten years ago she moved back to her home state of Florida, and many were surprised to hear that her Fates and Furies follow-up would be a collection of short stories centered around the history, ecosystem, and psyche of Florida through characters that are wives, mothers, homeless women. The publisher says, "the stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries. Storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life."