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Fates and Furies
615 pages
A dazzling, two-sided portrait of a marriage that peels back the golden veneer of a creative partnership to reveal the dark, hidden machinery of female rage and sacrifice.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like attending a glamorous, sun-drenched party that slowly descends into a shadowed, intimate confession. The narrative is split into two distinct halves, offering a dizzying shift in perspective that completely rewrites the emotional landscape you thought you understood. The prose is lush, muscular, and fiercely intelligent, carrying a mythic weight that elevates a modern marriage into a Greek tragedy. It begins in an intoxicating haze of youthful ambition and golden-boy privilege, only to sharply pivot into a cold, brilliant examination of female rage, invisible labor, and the secrets that hold a partnership together. It is a perfect match for readers who crave structurally inventive literary fiction and love dissecting the complex, often ruthless architecture of long-term relationships.
- Mood
- intoxicating
- shadowed
- glamorous
- simmering
- Tone
- lyrical
- observant
- cynical
- mythic
- theatrical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the architecture of marriage · hidden resentments · the illusion of genius · female rage · invisible labor
- The writing
- Lush, muscular, and fiercely intelligent, with a theatrical flair and mythic resonance.
- The arc
- Begins in a golden, intoxicating haze of young love and artistic ambition, then sharply fractures into a darker, colder revelation of hidden sacrifices and simmering rage.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love dissecting complex, flawed relationships and revel in gorgeous, razor-sharp sentences.
Content notes
- infidelity
- death of a spouse
- depression
- referenced sexual violence
About the book
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. 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.
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 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 sometimes it's what you don't say-- to protect your partner's vanity, their reputation, their heart-- that makes a marriage hum. Until it doesn't...
Description from Open Library.
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