There are two sides to every relationship. Fates and Furies explores the seemingly charmed life of Lotto from his golden childhood through to his career success. But that's just the first half of the book. The second half reveals his wife, Mathilde's secrets.

Groff gets inside the idea of the successful, famous white man and reveals the secrets that get him there. The story is a bit heavy-handed on Mathilde's background trauma before she meets Lotto. Lotto himself frequently feels like a caricature of a successful white man. Groff's prose and storytelling keep the reader engaged, however.

The characters in this novel are despicable, spiteful and plain unlikeable. However, that being said, Fates & Furies was a phenomenal read.

This is the love story of Lotto and Mathilde. The Fates: The building up of a 20 year marriage. The Furies: The delayering of it. From perfection to perfectly flawed characters stripped of their stories living in their own play. The final act: A death reveals a truth. This is a backwards, upside down spiral of a story that will require the reader to piece it back together again in an attempt to decipher the people who we believe we are closest to; whom we think we know and love, when in reality, have never been further from the truth. The lengths one woman would go for love in order to protect it.

Groff writes splendid prose with Shakespearean and mythological references woven in. Read it, relish it. I’ve read some conflicting reviews - Groff's style is quite unique - but I have to say, this woman can write!

3 stars for the beautiful prose alone (I mean the storytelling skills as a writing tool, not the content).
Otherwise - 2 stars, as this prettily written novel is truly shallow and unreadable. Too much trying for the higher literature, antic drama and Shakespeare, yet this book very much lacks in the real connectivity and readability. Sex has so big a place here, it almost makes it being a third main character - yet it makes only for a more shallow read (like all things without their true meaning). Yes, the authoress' talent makes you read and maybe even care about the characters, yet very little of the novel stays with the reader after leaving its pages.

DNF @ page 115

The writing style is definitely not for me. The characters are unbelievably annoying. Not for me.

I couldn't get into the storyline and didn't like the writing style that much.

This is another hyped book, that it took me a while to get around to because I couldn’t face another book described as the next Gone Girl. First things first – this book is not at all like Gone Girl. A book with different points of view on a marriage is not automatically like Gone Girl – just as, sadly, my dark hair and green eyes do not make me like Olivia Wilde.
As the blurb would have it – every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Fates and Furies skips forward and back through the 24-year marriage of Lotto and Mathilde, telling the story firstly from his point of view, then from hers. Gone Girl fans who go in for the thriller pace and big twists are set up to be disappointed, as this book is more about subtle complexity and some truly beautiful writing.

Neither Lotto nor Mathilde are particularly likeable – beautiful, rich, privileged white people - but they are interesting, which is better. Reading this book is reading the same story twice, but the different viewpoint recasts everything you think you knew. Lotto is the ‘Fates’ seeing his relationship as a great love story; Mathilde the ‘Furies’ who has a surface that belies her true interior.

Fates and Furies isn’t the easiest read – if you want a turn off your brain thriller, you’ll find it hard work. However, once you get past the slow pace of the start, it becomes extremely rewarding – there is a reason Barack Obama named this his book of the year shortly after its release. It is a dream book for book clubs – holding a mirror up to real life in a way that is bound to get the conversations flowing at your BC meeting. If you have already read it – I’d be interested to hear if you are Team Lotto or Team Mathilde!