Fates and Furies

Finalist, National Book Awards 2015 for Fiction

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff book cover, 2015
ISBN 978-1594634475
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House
Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award Finalist and bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. (Photo credit: Eli Sinkus) More about this author >

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From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception. Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. 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. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.

Judges Citation

Lauren Groff’s audacious novel, Fates and Furies, is an astounding portrait of a marriage. With all the elements of Greek Tragedy, Mathilde escapes her dreadful childhood when she marries Lotto, who believes his destiny is to fill the Great American Artist archetype. In “Fates” we are seduced by Mathilde’s and Lotto’s inspiring union, but the “two sides of every story” trope is never truer than in a marriage. “Furies” reveals Mathilde’s tempestuous rage boiling beneath the surface.

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