She genuinely loves him, but she initially set out to win him for mercenary reasons.

Much of what Lotto takes for granted in his good fortune, it turns out, is due to Mathilde’s ruthless machination, right down to their marriage itself. The second half reveals that Mathilde has, through implacable willpower, transcended circumstances that read like a hotchpotch of Greek tragedy, fable and detective novel. The first half of the book offers Lotto’s view of their life together as he rises from charming but failed actor to celebrated playwright, thanks in no small part to Mathilde’s editorial finesse. She, an apparent “ice princess”, is the survivor of a past about which her husband has only the fuzziest idea beyond it being “sad and dark”, and above all “blank behind her”. He is the darling of a prosperous Florida family – “Lotto was special. The novel tells the story of Lotto and Mathilde Satterwhite. And in fact, they almost did: Groff has said that she originally wanted to publish Fates and Furies as two separate books. It’s as if husband and wife each inhabit a different novel, in a different genre – one sunnily domestic, the other gothic. Like Gone Girl, Fates and Furies is about a marriage in which each partner has a radically disparate view, not just of their union, but of the type of narrative constituted by their lives. Fates and Furies, while decidedly a work of literary fiction, doesn’t just resemble Gone Girl in a few key respects it comes much closer than The Girl on the Train to offering the same leery take on the state of modern matrimony. The Girl on the Train, like a reduced-calorie substitute, numbed the hunger the reading public feels for more thrillers along the lines of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant, genre-busting Gone Girl, yet it doesn’t truly satisfy the craving. True, far more people bought the UK equivalent, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, than Fates and Furies in 2015, but they talked about it less enthusiastically. The cherry on the top came from Barack Obama, who earlier this month told People magazine he liked Fates and Furies more than anything else he’d read in 2015.

Not only has Groff’s novel, by the Wall Street Journal’s count, landed on more US year-end best-of lists than any other work of fiction, but Amazon has made it official, stamping its endorsement on Fates and Furies as the retailer’s book of the year. Critics love it, or – even better – debate its merits. Celebrities such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Carrie Brownstein and Miranda July are pictured on Instagram with it. In fact, the book that “everybody” seems to be reading often climbs no higher than a respectable but unspectacular slot on the bestseller list. T o qualify as the US book of the year – that ineffable title to which Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies, lays persuasive claim – a novel needs more than just blockbuster sales.

Fates and furies review