Enemy Women : A Novel
Author(s): Paulette Jiles
From the Author of the National Book Award Finalist News of the World
Good Morning America Book Club Pick
For the Colleys of southeastern Missouri, the War between the States is a plague that threatens devastation, despite the family’s avowed neutrality. For eighteen-year-old Adair Colley, it is a nightmare that tears apart her family and forces her and her sisters to flee. The treachery of a fellow traveler, however, brings about her arrest, and she is caged with the criminal and deranged in a filthy women’s prison.
But young Adair finds that love can live even in a place of horror and despair. Her interrogator, a Union major, falls in love with her and vows to return for her when the fighting is over. Before he leaves for battle, he bestows upon her a precious gift: freedom.
Now an escaped "enemy woman," Adair must make her harrowing way south buoyed by a promise . . . seeking a home and a family that may be nothing more than a memory.
Review(s):
“ENEMY WOMEN deserves the Pulitzer Prize.”
“I loved…it provides the greatest suspense a story can offer: will someone we’ve come to love persevere and prosper?”
“…remarkable happens...it becomes inspired… Adair becomes a storyteller in order to survive. And so - triumphantly - does Paulette Jiles.”
“This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence.”
“Jiles paints the struggles of the era with the same intensity as Charles Frazier’s 1997 bestseller Cold Mountain …”
“Sure to be touted as a new COLD MOUNTAIN...stark, unsentimental, yet touching novel will not suffer in comparison.”
“A remarkable debut… Splendid.”
“…beautifully written passages…a real page-turner.”
“...[G]ifted Missouri historian...acutely portrays Missouri’s logistic misfortune as a hotbed of both Union and Confederate violence.”
“Enemy Women is all strength and poetry, as are history’s grandest ordinary women and extraordinary writing.”
ISBN: 9780061337635