Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff's third novel portrays a marriage across twenty-four years. Lotto and Mathilde, at twenty-two, are glamorous, tall, wildly in love and seemingly bound for greatness. Ten years on, their friends still envy them, but the marriage depends as much on what goes unsaid as on what the two share. The story is told first from the husband's side and then from the wife's, and it turns on how two people can see the same relationship in very different ways. Greek mythology shapes the book, with gods and vengeance as running themes, and Groff first imagined it as two separate novels before her agent urged her to combine them. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

It appears in a roundup of the novels and poetry linked to Barack Obama during his presidency.