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Groff is perhaps best known for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and Barack Obama’s favorite book of the year. (“I just died, came back to life, read again, died again,” Groff wrote on Twitter after learning of Obama’s endorsement.) Fates and Furies tells the story of a modern-day marriage from the perspectives of both the husband and the wife, and its sneaky humor and observations about gender are hallmarks of Groff’s work. So is her understanding of history: It keeps repeating itself, but we keep ignoring its lessons. Her short story collection Florida, also a finalist for the National Book Award, looks at people trapped in cycles of loneliness and rage while the natural world undergoes its own crises. Her novel Matrix, yet another finalist for the National Book Award, is about powerful and independent women—in this case nuns in twelfth-century England—who break the age-old constraints of male oppression. Groff’s inner tuning fork has also picked up some eerily prescient signals. Her novel Arcadia, released eight years before Covid hit, features a deadly global virus, and The Vaster Wilds is about a girl who escapes a colonial American settlement ravaged by contagious disease and starvation. The Vaster Wilds features some of Groff’s most beautiful writing about the outdoors, and though it’s set in the past, it also works as an imagining of a future where humans have disappeared but landscapes continue to thrive. The Guardian described it as “the Book of Job meets Bear Grylls,” but the real star is Mother Nature.
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