Floridaisa magnificent collection,executed withtremendous depth and precision,unsettling in the best possible way.Lauren Groff is a virtuoso.Emily St John Mandel, author ofStation Eleven

In her vigorous and moving new book, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling and intelligence to a world in which storms, snakes and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple; a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character a steely and conflicted wife and mother.

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind becomes its gravitational centre: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury the moments that make us alive. Startling, precise and affecting,Floridais a magnificent achievement.

Lauren Groff is the author of threeNew York Timesbestselling novels Fates and Furies(named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015),The Monsters of TempletonandArcadia as well as the story collectionDelicate Edible Birds. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of WisconsinMadison. Groffs fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/O. Henry Award, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize. In 2017, she was named one ofGrantas Best of Young American Novelists. Her stories have appeared in publications includingThe New Yorker, theAtlantic,One StoryandPloughshares, and in several of the annualTheBest New American Storiesanthologies. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.