Morning Coffee Book Club

Join the Morning Coffee Book Club where Scott Biegen, a PSPL Librarian (and English Teacher in a previous life), leads a monthly book discussion.

The group meets the 3rd Wednesday of the month from 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library in downtown Palm Springs. Coffee and muffins are graciously provided by Aspen Mills.

To receive meeting information and join the email list for the Morning Coffee Book Club, please email Scott Biegen in advance of the meeting at scott.biegen@palmspringsca.gov

View other selections for the Morning Coffee Book Club.

September 21, 2022

Matrix by Lauren Groff

—Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award

One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

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