Florida

Florida is a magnificent collection, executed with tremendous depth and precision, unsettling in the best possible way. Lauren Groff is a virtuoso. Dont tell yourself you dont like short stories, because these are not to be missed. The book is deep and dark and resonant. Every story plays in some way on the others and in the end the total is worth even more than the sum of its beautiful parts. Its beautiful. Its giving me rich, grand nightmares. * Observer * Florida feels innovative and terribly relevant. Any one of its stories is a bracing read; together they form a masterpiece. * Stylist * This is what she shows in story after story: a heroic pushback against the way we live now, against waste, against the artificial environments in which we find ourselves maintained by corporations, but equally against the pressures on women to be flawless, effortlessly excellent mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, within this dire state of affairs Groffs lyrical and oblique stories catch these women in the midst of becoming aware of their complicity in perpetuating these narratives to which their response is to walk, flee, or conversely refuse to budge, as in the dazzlingly apocalyptic Eyewall The hot, humid Floridian atmosphere hangs over all the stories Every woman, every snake, is fighting back against the laws of nature, and the human-made Eden that threatens to imprison, or end, them all. * Guardian * A lushly evocative collection of stories about the Sunshine State, its inhabitants and its history Mesmerising In her previous book, Fates and Furies which was picked by Barack Obama as his favourite read of 2015 Groff painted a psychologically rich portrait of a marriage as told from both sides. She brings the same attention to detail to Florida, in a multifaceted portrayal of both the state and its inhabitants The Florida winter wraps itself around camellias and peach trees and dogwoods and oranges, but it is the summer she captures so well Shes a writer whose turn of phrase can stop you in your tracks Something untameable lurks restlessly beneath the surface of this book. Groffs incomparable prose pulsates with peril; its beauty, like that of the titular state itself, lies in a certain wild lushness. * Financial Times * The collection testifies to Groffs brilliance as a writer of both places and people. She grapples with interpersonal relations and the inner lives of others with perceptiveness, wit and emotional engagement. * Literary Review * Easily the years best story collection . . . these indelibly vivid tales read like inoculations against cynicism. * Vogue * She is an example of writers who can do everything dialogue, structure, the throb and hum of inner life so brilliantly. The result is so heady and evocative, youll be wafting away imaginary heat waves and checking your room for scaly threats as you read, while Floridas cast of lost, sad and sometimes cruel characters will stick with you far longer. * Esquire UK * An unsettling, stinging collection that feeds on Floridas paradoxes. * Sunday Times * She boldly explores conflicts and connections between everything from humans and their natural surroundings to pleasure and pain. * Time Magazine * These psychological stories, whose impeccable structures are at odds with the chaos they often describe, provide glimpses into a variety of lives under the same tempestuous sky. * Spectator * One of the most eagerly anticipated short story collections of the year. * Stylist * A connoisseur of the tension between appearance and depth. Her dazzling third novel, Fates and Furies, a portrait of a marriage built on secrets, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her new collection plunges into similarly murky terrain There is more than a little of David Lynch in Ms Groff's Floridian landscape: exotic and bright, yet pulsing with hidden malevolence Real and metaphorical

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and Matrix, and two short story collections, Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists.