Matrix
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Matrix
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Narrated by:
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Adjoa Andoh
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By:
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Lauren Groff
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
Meet the indomitable Marie de France.
Born from a long line of female warriors and crusaders, yet too coarse, too wild, too rough-hewn for courtly life, Marie de France is cast from the royal court. Woefully, she is sent to the muddy fields of Angleterre to take up her new duty as the prioress of an impoverished abbey.
The abbey is a dreadful place: its inhabitants are on the brink of starvation, beset by disease, stoic and stern, yet plagued with an unholy tendency to gossip. Marie cannot help but pine for the decadence and comfort of France, her secret lover Cecily, her queen Eleanor and the very court that had spited her.
Yet Marie soon realises that, though she may be tied to a life of duty, she wields more power than she could have imagined. With the fearlessness that has always set her apart, she inspires her new sisterhood to awaken their spirits and finally claim what is theirs.
A dazzling work of literature, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality and ecstasy in a mesmerising portrait of consuming passion and womanhood.
©2021 Lauren Groff (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Matrix
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- london-customer
- 08-05-24
Wonderful novel about a world without men
I loved the beautiful descriptions of the tough everyday life in a convent in the XII century, the characters, the politics inside a closed self sufficient organisation.
A couple of things I didnt agree with were when it says Marie was not fluent in English after 5 years (unlikely) and that a girl was able to speak latin from listening to mass (also unlikely). When Marie goes to London it says it was full of smog. I understand smog in London was only a consequence of the industrial revolution so unlikely in the XII century? But I loved the novel regardless.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Heather Shaw
- 29-04-24
Fantastic
Lauren Groff has done wonders with researching this story and brings a whole life to the page. The narration adds another level of brilliance.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Julia Monaghan
- 08-10-21
I love a good nun story!
This is a story about love and a shared life together and female resistance and resilience.
Well written by Lauren Groff and beautifully performed by Adjoa Andoh.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Richard Butlin
- 03-07-24
A bit disjointed but interesting concepts
I found the story disjointed in its layout but there were lots of interesting concepts touched upon by the book, overall a good editor might have made the novel more fluid and easier to get to grips with.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- "tappingpoodle"
- 28-01-22
Brilliantly read. Interesting but not gripping.
Great narration. Very inventive narrative, but dragged a bit. Rather too much focus on sex.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Mr Celine Besson Potts
- 25-03-23
Brilliant performance. Riveting.
Interesting voice (from the writer) throughout the novel, beautifully interpreted.
Amazing to bring to life what may seem as a very uneventful dull story - an bastard ugly heir to a throne become an abbess and her life in the abbey, but it is done masterfully,
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- GK
- 28-01-23
Great book with excellent narrative
Enjoyable and insightful listen. It highlights origination of nun convents I never thought about. Brilliant reading performance
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Michelle
- 29-07-22
Short and sweet
A lovely book if not a bit strange? It could have been exceptional, as the plot is different, but somehow it reaches interesting heights not exceptional!
The writing is flowery, but engaging.
You root for the main character Marie for the whole book and can’t help, but admire her.
The narration is excellent…
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Keith
- 11-01-22
Luminous
This is an incredibly powerful work. Marie is a tremendous creation: fierce, intelligent, political, it is her story across several decades and the life she led running an abbey, lightly interacting with Eleanor of Acquitane.
Great reading too.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- EEL
- 06-11-21
Misspeaking the Office Hours
The reader here is an accomplished actor whose work on other audio books I have very much enjoyed. Sadly, here she didn't have proper advice on some of the technical terms that are bound to come up in a book set in a medieval nunnery and thus the performance is full of repeated mispronunciations of key words, e.g. terce (ter-chay rather than terse), none (no-neigh rather than known), prime (pree-may rather than prime), compline (com-pleen rather than complin); oddly, there is one short passage (I think a single sentence) in the second half where all the Office Hours were pronounced properly, which was all odd. The most distracting mispronunciation was lai as 'lie' (rather than lay), which meant I kept misunderstanding the text (Marie sends Eleanor her lies? Ah, yes, no, she sent her Lais, as in the Lais de Marie de France), although luckily there wasn't a very sustained mention of the Lais.
Pengin's audio books do this rather too often, which seems regrettable. One can't blame the actors (one can't know how to pronounce everything), but a press ought to exercise some editorial control/advice over the sonic text as they do over the printed text.
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5 people found this helpful