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Johny Pitts talks to Lauren Groff about her latest novel Matrix. It continues themes of women and climate change explores in her previous books, Fate and Furies, Florida, and The Monsters of Templeton but the historical world she constructs couldn’t be more different.
The novel opens with illegitimate 17-year-old Marie of France being banished from the court of her half-brother Henry II by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Leaving behind all her comfortable trappings, she's sent to an abbey in a cold, isolated part of 12th-century England. There she inspires a new generation of nuns to build a sort of utopia, free of men and surrounded by an elaborate labyrinth built to keep the outside world - outside.

Written almost thirty years apart, Swan Songs by Lee Scott and Junglist by Two Fingers and James T. Kirk (Eddie Otchere and Andrew Green) are novels that read as offbeat documentations of working-class life in Britain. Johny talks to Eddie Otchere and Lee Swan about their approaches to writing and the urban music that inspired them.

And the American writer and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki, whose new novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, shares her love of Shakespeare in The Book I've Never Lend.

Image copyright: Eli Sinkus

Southbank Centre: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/literature-poetry/open-book

Book List – Sunday 17 October and Thursday 21 October

Matrix by Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
Florida by Lauren Groff
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Swan Songs by Lee Scott
Junglist by Eddie Otchere and Andrew Green
The Riverside Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki