Fates and Furies

Reviews of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies almost unanimously mention both Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, because like them it involves a death, and like them it intimate knowledge of a marriage its subject. Yet while it examines, as those two titles did, how little even two people living together as man and wife can truly know each other, Fates and Furies is significantly different for being less a thriller and more a beautiful work of literary fiction. Written in the third person, which makes it feel solidly believable, it is a work of two parts: Fates is handsome, charismatic Lotto’s story, in which he tells of the electric beginning and building of his 24-year marriage to Mathilde; Furies is his wife’s version, which cleverly undercuts Lotto’s knowledge and memory of events, and shows her orchestration and manipulation of their life together – as well as how she has maintained her secrets within it. Barack Obama proclaimed Fates and Furies the best novel he read in 2015, Amazon declared it its book of the year, and it featured on more best-of end-of-year lists than any other title published that same year.