Spiegel & Grau has acquired Janet Rich Edwards’s debut novel Canticle, a work of historical fiction set in medieval Belgium among the Beguines, a renegade religious order of women who resisted the patriarchy and corruption of the Catholic church of that era. The story follows a misunderstood seventeen-year-old forced to lodge with this group of pious radicals after fleeing her own wedding, initiating a turbulent series of events and ensnaring her in a complex web spun by manipulative religious authorities, forcing her into difficult choices that threaten her relationships and imperil her very life.
