Enemy Women (P.S.) - Softcover

Jiles, Paulette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061337633 ISBN 13: 9780061337635

Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"A remarkable debut... Splendid."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Jiles has created an unsentimental yet tender world of destruction, despair, and hope that's a joy to inhabit."--Entertainment Weekly

"Comparing Enemy Women to Cold Mountain doesn't quite do Jiles's novel justice."--Washington Post

"I loved...it provides the greatest suspense a story can offer: will someone we've come to love persevere and prosper?"--Anna Quindlen

"Enemy Women is all strength and poetry, as are history's grandest ordinary women and extraordinary writing."--Kaye Gibbons

"Jiles paints the struggles of the era with the same intensity as Charles Frazier's 1997 bestseller Cold Mountain ..."--People

"ENEMY WOMEN...has a Homeresque feel to it. Like something written by an old soul."--Carolyn Chute

"ENEMY WOMEN deserves the Pulitzer Prize."--Toronto Globe and Mail

"This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence."--New York Times

"You know what it means when there is Paulette Jiles inside? Be smart. Open the book."--Gordon Lish

From the Publisher:

If there was ever a book I wish I could unread for the joy of reading it again for the first time, ENEMY WOMEN is that book. The world Paulette Jiles evokes is so compelling, so richly imagined and absorbing that I found waking life dim in comparison.

ENEMY WOMEN is Paulette’s first novel, written in her sixth decade – a debut of almost shocking confidence. Two things spurred her to write it: visiting the graves of her Southern forebears and wondering what had happened to them in the Civil War that claimed their lives; and finding a period photograph of a beautiful young woman who gazes out from her frame with a startling intimacy and challenge. These hidden stories twined together in her mind and resulted in the heroic novel you have before you.

Paulette has the heart of a poet and the determination of a historian. She spent eight years researching the book because she wanted every detail to rest on truth, but her novel hasn’t got even a tinge of dusty academia about it; on reading it you have the conviction that you’re bearing witness to actual events, both great and humbling. Nor did she stop at the archives. To guarantee that her heroine Adair was capable of the mighty feats of horsemanship she writes about, she jumped her own horse off a cliff and swam it across a river in spring floods. That is what I call attention to detail, and it’s what gives ENEMY WOMEN its extraordinary sense of vibrant life.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0061337633
• ISBN 13: 9780061337635
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352