Hunger's Brides - Hardcover

Anderson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845291719 ISBN 13: 9781845291716

Publisher: Constable, 2005

Synopsis

In the dead of a frigid winter 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. Brilliant, erratic and driven, she had disappeared into Mexico two years earlier, following her growing obsession with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who was born in 1648, entered a convent at 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 evidence Beulah may have compiled 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, part biography and part fiction, about Sor Juana.

Based on the life of one of literature's most seductive and 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.

About this title

Review:

One of the most remarkable books in recent memory . . . a taut, challenging novel of ideas. Anderson draws on history and mythology, church lore and folklore, psychology and cosmology, the complexities of theology and politics, to create a vibrant tapestry of belief and knowledge . . . Anderson's debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. (Quill & Quire )

Anderson is after far more than an imagining of the hidden life of a writer. The novel attempts nothing less than an apocalyptic anatomising of modernity . . . the greatest achievement of Anderson's novel (and perhaps its true subject) is in the evocation of the teeming, sordid pageant of Mesoamerica: its mythical, blood-soaked history, its geography of extremes, the holocaust of its cities and people. (Globe and Mail )

Like Molly Bloom on peyote . . . Anderson writes as the best painters paint -- with clarity, finesse and infinite suggestion . . . all this beauty is worth the trip (Vancouver Sun)

Hunger's Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logic of myopic inquisition. See for yourself (Calgary Herald)

Book Description:

Based on the life of one of literature's most seductive and 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Constable
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1845291719
• ISBN 13: 9781845291716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1408