Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies is a bisected novel about a marriage that looks, from the outside, like a kind of myth. The first half, Fates, is told from the perspective of Lancelot Lotto Satterwhite, a tall, charming, wildly lucky son of a Florida bottled water dynasty who fails as an actor and reinvents himself as an acclaimed playwright. He meets Mathilde at twenty two, marries her two weeks later, and credits her quiet steadiness with everything he becomes. The second half, Furies, hands the same twenty four years to Mathilde, and the marriage that seemed like fate reveals itself as the product of choice, secrecy, and ruthless engineering. Groff writes in dense, allusive prose laced with classical references and bracketed asides from the Fates themselves, turning a domestic novel into something closer to Greek tragedy. The result is a fierce, formally daring meditation on the stories couples tell themselves to make a life feel destined.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Fates and Furies
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Lotto and Mathilde marry at twenty-two and stay married for twenty-four years. The first half of the novel is his version of those years. The second half is hers, and they are not telling the same story at all.
Yes. Fates and Furies was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015 and was named Barack Obama's favorite book of the year. It cemented Lauren Groff's reputation as a leading literary novelist.
Fates and Furies has a two-part structure that retells the same marriage from each spouse's perspective, with significantly different angles. The prose is lyrical but the structure rewards careful reading. Many readers find the second half particularly demanding and rewarding.
Fates and Furies was written by Lauren Groff by Riverhead Books.
Fates and Furies is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Fates and Furies takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Fates and Furies is a standalone novel by Lauren Groff, not part of a series.
Fates and Furies is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.