Monsters of Templeton

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and two other story collections, including Florida. Winner of The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, she has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and her books have been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.

"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, and there is no higher success than that." Stephen King "THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON is a bold and beautiful hybrid of a book...Lauren Groff is an exciting young novelist, gifted with an elegant prose style and a narrative ambition as deep and as serious as the human mysteries she sets out to explore." Lorrie Moore "Groff's delightful debut is a glorious hybrid of history and humour, with just a sprinkling of magic." Easy Living "This cracking tale, admirer Stephen King gleefully says, is full of "monsters, murders, bastards and ne'er do-wells". Yet Lauren Groff's remarkable debut is not a horror at all...as Willie slays her demons by slowly but surely excavating her family tree, the novel blossoms into a crossbreed of intimate confession, eccentric social history, origin myth and literary biography... the true 'monsters' of Templeton are its secrets." Metro "This has an opening to die for ... a riveting read" Scotland on Sunday