Talking Volumes: Lauren Groff on 'Matrix'

Host Kerri Miller kicked off the fall season of Talking Volumes on Tuesday with a conversation at the Fitzgerald Theater featuring novelist Lauren Groff, whose latest book is “Matrix.”

From the publisher:  

Bestselling author and two-time National Book Award finalist 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.  

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. 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.  

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.

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