Junket

By Lauren Groff

In these over-busy, stress-rich days, what sounds better than a stay at a high-end spa, complete with a much-needed change of scenery, in a warmer, gentler spot? The heroine of this latest story from beloved bestselling author Lauren Groff is offered just that: a few all-expenses-paid days of pampering at an Arizona retreat, far from the colorless cold of late winter in her hometown of Boston. Soon she’s squinting into desert sunlight, a kind of all-encompassing brightness she’s not known in years.

But relaxing is harder than it seems for Groff’s narrator, who, like so many of her unforgettable characters, is thrillingly complex and conflicted. A novelist, she’s been invited to the retreat to bring an air of intellectual sophistication—but only because a “far more famous writer” canceled at the last minute. She hasn’t had a full night’s sleep or written with any enthusiasm in months and is fresh from a breakup. Arriving with her guard up, she quickly becomes ill at ease with the wastefulness-in-the-name-of-luxury she sees around her, the complacency of the other guests—so wealthy she can barely relate to them or them to her—and the New Age spirituality on the overpriced spa menu. And yet something starts working on her. Maybe it’s the jarring beauty of the desert, the response to the reading she gives from her latest book, or even those New Age treatments she’s so suspicious of. Despite herself, her cynicism begins to soften.

And as it does so, she becomes overwhelmed by what she feels—and we are drawn into the existential and psychological terrain that Groff maps with such uncanny skill, providing piercing insight after insight into what it means to live among the twenty-first century’s environmental and socioeconomic crises. In Junket, as with her recent internationally celebrated novel Matrix, she conjures a woman at a crossroads who, rather than surrender to desolation, finds renewed courage and strength via her art, a path to a creative vision all her own, confirming once again that this three-time National Book Award finalist is a master of both the sublime and the subversive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094441658

Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: the instant New York Times bestseller The Vaster Wilds, and two National Book Award Finalists, Matrix and Fates and Furies; as well as Aradia and The Monsters of Templeton. Her story collections include Florida, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Delicate Edible Birds. She has twice been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, as well as for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

Book preview

A FRIEND CALLS the writer out of the blue on the darkest and coldest day of the year: Does she have any interest in a free junket to a fancy spa in Arizona? The friend hosts retreats there, and sometimes they bring artists down to demonstrate that they can do so, to give deep luxury a tang of the intellectual. But only for a weekend. Any longer would simply be disturbing, artists being notoriously unstable, slovenly at the table, gaping at celebrities who just want to pretend to be nobodies for a weekend. No offense, the friend says.

None taken, the writer says. Yes, yes, there is great interest. She smiles into the phone, imagining Arizona sun baking her undercooked winter skin. Boston, with its mean early March glitter, the cold shadows, the insomnia, can stay where it is. The work that lies slack and boneless, barely twitching these dark months, won’t miss her. Nor will the apartment, which she came back to one afternoon in the fall to discover had been emptied of half the books and furniture, as well as the entire boyfriend. And the cat. She told her friends that she missed the books most, she almost convinced herself of this, but had begun to want to rub up against strangers in the elevator and was starting to suspect that her body disagreed.

Does it matter, her friend says delicately on the phone, that she’s being invited so late because a far more famous writer has double-booked herself?

It does not. She has the night to pack and wakes in the dark for the ride to the airport. Airports are the limbo of the contemporary: bland and safe and packed full of anxious souls ready to return to wherever their real life is.

On the plane, the child in the middle seat smells like pee and graham crackers. The girl slowly falls asleep and her head slides across the armrest and

Reviews for Junket

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[Sheena Gurbakhash · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully articulate and insightful. It's a very compassionate and gentle read which feels uplifting.

[James · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A personal snapshot into the religion of self disguised as self-care. Her languaging (a gerund just for you) is very visceral and lyrical.