Buy at Bookshop.orgBuy at BAM (Books-a-Million)Buy on AmazonBuy on Barnes and NobleBuy at Apple Books
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Winner of the Madame Figaro Grand Prix le l’Héroïne
Winner of the American Booksellers’ Association Award for Adult Fiction
NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club Pick
New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book of 2015
Foreign rights sold in 30+ countries
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.
“With Fates and Furies Lauren Groff goes many levels below the surface of a marriage, into a place that is perhaps as hard to reach as it is to describe, but Groff, a bold and marvelous writer, is able to do both. Because she's so vitally talented line for line and passage for passage, and because her ideas about the ways in which two people can live together and live inside each other, or fall away from each other, or betray each other, feel foundationally sound and true, Fates and Furies becomes a book to submit to, and be knocked out by, as I certainly was.” – Meg Wolitzer, New York Times-bestselling author of THE INTERESTINGS
“In a swirling miasma of language, plot, and Greek mythology, Groff weaves a fierce and gripping tale of true love gone asunder. . . . Groff’s prose is variously dewy, defiant, salacious, and bleak—a hurricane of words thrown together on every page. Yet so much of the power in this book lies in what’s unspoken. . . . An intoxicating elixir.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The plotting is exquisite, and the sentences hum; Groff writes with a pleasurable, bantering vividness. An intricate plot, perfect title, and a harrowing look at the tie that binds.” –Kirkus (starred review)
“This is a complex albeit harrowing look at marriage, not least because of Groff’s dark and dazzling prose, which seduces the reader as much as the golden couple at the center of the compelling story. Glamorous Lotto and Mathilde marry at 22, much to the consternation of family and friends, who take bets on the year the marriage will dissolve. But the two stay married for decades, for they are, and remain, completely besotted with each other, possessed of a “terrible hunger” that will not be sated. The first half of the novel, entitled “Fates,” gives lanky lothario Lotto’s perspective on the marriage. He sees nothing but Mathilde’s goodness (“the best person I know”) and her unerring belief in his talent, and, after some years of struggling as an actor, Lotto finds great success as a playwright, which brings the couple both fame and wealth. The second half of the novel, “Furies,” turns the lens on Mathilde and will upend readers’ expectations, for she is possessed of a cold calculation that will surprise and even dismay. Taking a page from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl–like view of marriage, Groff fashions a searing, multilayered portrait of a union that seems to thrive on its darkest secrets.” –Booklist (starred review)
“Like a classic tragedy, Groff’s novel offers high drama, hubris, and epic love, complete with Greek chorus–like asides. A singular and compelling literary read, populated with extraordinary characters; highly recommended. –Library Journal (starred review)
