Synopsis
"Lauren Groff's debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, is everything a reader might have expected from this gifted writer, and more . . . There are monsters, murders, bastards, and ne'er-do-wells almost without number. I was sorry to see this rich and wonderful novel come to an end."
--Stephen King"Lauren Groff hits a home run in her first at-bat, with a novel that is intriguingly constructed and compulsively readable."
--Denver Post"Groff's multilayered saga both thrills and delights with poignant, breathtaking prose."
--Entertainment Weekly (A)"The Monsters of Templeton, a fascinating first novel by Lauren Groff, is a book with joy in its marrow--fabulous."
--San Francisco ChronicleIn the wake of a wildly disastrous affair with her married archaeology professor, Willie Upton arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in storybook Templeton, New York, looking to hide in the one place to which she swore she'd never come back. As soon as she arrives, though, a prehistoric monster surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass, changing the very fabric of the town. What's more, Willie's hippie-turned-born-again-Baptist mother, Vi, tells her a secret she's been hiding for nearly thirty years: that Willie's father wasn't the random man from a free-love commune that Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from this very town. As Willie puts her archaeological skills to work digging for the truth about her lineage, she discovers that the secrets of her family run deep when past and present blur, dark mysteries come to light, and the shocking truth about more than one monster is revealed.
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About Lauren Groff
L
Lauren Groff
Born 1978
Lauren Groff is the author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her third novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kirkus Award. It won the 2015 American Booksellers’ Association Indies’ Choice Award for Fiction, was a New York Times Notable book and Bestseller, Amazon.com’s #1 book of 2015, and on over two dozen best-of 2015 lists. It also received the 2016 American Bookseller Association’s Indies’ Choice Award for Adult Fiction and, in France, the Madame Figaro Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Rights have been sold in thirty countries. Her collection of stories, Florida, was released in June 2018. It won the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prize, and the Southern Book Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House, One Story, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and five editions of the Best American Short Stories. In 2017, she was named by Granta Magazine as one of the Best of Young American Novelists of her generation. In 2018, she received a Guggenheim fellowship in Fiction and a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, two sons, and dog. ([source][1]) [1]: https://laurengroff.com/about/
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