Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment of the Grubbie Debut event series, featuring Janet Edwards! Join us for a celebration of their debut novel, Canticle. Michelle Hoover will join Edwards in conversation, and the author talk will be followed by a signing line.

This event is co-presented by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books

A masterful debut novel following a spirited young woman's explorations of faith, agency, and love in thirteenth-century Bruges.

Aleys is sixteen years old and unusual: stubborn, bright, and prone to religious visions. She and her only friend, Finn, a young scholar, have been learning Latin together in secret--but just as she thinks their connection might become something more, everything unravels. When her father promises her in marriage to a merchant she doesn't love, she runs away from home, finding shelter among the beguines, a fiercely independent community of religious women who refuse to answer to the Church.

Among these hardworking and strong-willed women, Aleys glimpses for the first time the joys of belonging: a life of song, meaning, and friendship in the markets and along the canals of Bruges. But forces both mystical and political are at work. Illegal translations of scripture, the women's independence, and a sudden rash of miracles all draw the attention of an ambitious bishop--and bring Aleys and those around her into ever-increasing danger, a danger that will push Aleys to a new understanding of love and sacrifice.

Grounded in the little-told stories of medieval women--mystics, saints, anchoresses, and beguines--and introducing a major new talent, Canticle is a luminous work of historical fiction, vividly evoking a world on the verge of transformation.

Janet Rich Edwards is a graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University and works in the Division of Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Canticle is her debut novel. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Michelle Hoover has taught writing for more than 25 years and currently leads the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program, which she co-founded in 2011. Her students have signed 50+ book contracts. She is a 2014 NEA Fellow and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, a fellow at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and a winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award. Her debut, The Quickening, was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read," a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and one of Susan Straight's 1001 "Library of America" Novels featured in the L.A. Times. Her second novel, Bottomland, was the 2017 All Iowa Reads selection and a 2016 Mass Book "Must Read." She is the creator of The 7am Novelist, the popular podcast and webinar series for writers. She is a native of Iowa and lives in Cyprus and Boston.

Celebrating over 25 years as the nation's leading and largest independent center for creative writing, GrubStreet is the place where writers develop their craft – and themselves – through the power of writing and sharing their work. GrubStreet offers hundreds of creative writing programs and events for writers from all backgrounds and ages at its Center for Creative Writing in the Seaport, in many Boston neighborhoods, and online. Scholarships are available for all offerings, and many programs are free. At its center, GrubStreet also hosts a community lounge, a podcast studio, Porter Square Books: Boston Edition, and a Writers’ Stage. Learn more at www.grubstreet.org.

Grubbie Debut: Janet Edwards, author of Canticle, in conversation with Michelle Hoover