Hunger's Brides: A Novel of the Baroque »

Paul Anderson left Canada in his early twenties and spent fifteen years travelling in Asia, studying in Europe, teaching in Latin America, and logging 25,000 miles of coastal and ocean sailing. Hunger’s Brides, his first novel, has been a labour of twelve years. In 1996, Alberta’s One Yellow Rabbit company toured a dramatic reading adapted from the manuscript by the author, and performed in the convent where Sor Juana died. Anderson lives in Calgary.
From the Hardcover edition.

On a frigid winter's night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding. In his hands he clutches a box he has found there. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected college professor and serial adulterer, whose last affair has left his career in ruins. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students and for a brief time his lover. She had disappeared into Mexico two years earlier, following her obsession with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was born in 1648, entered a convent at age nineteen, and became the greatest poet of her time, only to die of plague in 1695. As a police investigation closes in around Gregory, he examines the box’s contents, fearful of incriminating evidence Beulah may have against him—translated poems of Sor Juana, a travel journal, research notes on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Inquisition, diary entries concerning him, and a strange manuscript about Sor Juana. Based on the life of one of literature’s most compelling figures, Paul Anderson’s astonishing debut unveils a great poet’s withdrawal from the world who at the height of her creative powers signs a vow of contrition in her own blood.

The Washington Post - Jaime Manrique

Hunger's Brides is a novel of high seriousness, a labor of love. And Anderson earns our admiration for his ability to write passages that leave us swooning with their musicality and their radiance.

Prologue
Echo — Book One
Isis — Book Two
Sappho — Book Three
Phoenix — Book Four
Horus — Book Five
Phaëthon — Book Six
Epilogue
Timeline
Notes
Acknowledgements
From the Hardcover edition.