Perhaps Groff herself says it best: "It was less a story than a great creature surfacing from the deep it was more sudden audible wave than narrative." Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. Lauren Groff is a writer of rare gifts, and Fates and Furies is an unabashedly ambitious novel that delivers - with comedy, tragedy, well-deployed. There are moments when the writing feels self-indulgent, but, for the most part, it's an intoxicating elixir. Yet so much of the power in this book lies in what's unspoken%E2%80%94Lotto's bottomless sorrow and self-pity flanked by Mathilde's white-hot rage and, later, her thirst for revenge. Groff's prose is variously dewy, defiant, salacious, and bleak%E2%80%94a hurricane of words thrown together on every page. Meanwhile, Mathilde's all-consuming adoration for her husband doesn't completely jive with the dark secrets she's hiding from him. "Fates," the first part, takes readers through Lotto's mopey years as a failed actor living in "glamorous poverty" in New York City's Greenwich Village, his overnight success as a playwright, his struggles with aging, his perpetually hungry ego, his estrangement from his millionaire mother, and his gleeful infatuation with and dependency on his pale, bewitching wife. Told in two interwoven parts, the fable-like story of Lancelot (Lotto) and Mathilde's 24-year marriage unfolds, first from Lotto's perspective, then Mathilde's. Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. In a swirling miasma of language, plot, and Greek mythology, Groff (Arcadia) weaves a fierce and gripping tale of true love gone asunder. From the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Florida, Matrix, and the highly-anticipated The Vaster Wilds: an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception.
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