The acclaimed Civil War saga about a young woman arrested on charges of 'enemy collaboration', the Union major who loves and frees her, and her quest for a home that may have... vanished.
A debut novel of startling power and savage beauty from critically acclaimed poet and memoirist Paulette Jiles - an extraordinary story of survival and love in the midst of a torn nation's bitter agony.
For the Colley family of 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's a nightmare at its most terrible when the Union Militia arrives to set her house on fire, driving her brother into hiding and dragging her widowed father away, beaten and bloodied. Left to care for two young sisters, Adair sees no road but the one that leads away, and they start out on foot in search of a safe haven.
They are doomed when the treachery of a fellow traveller brings about Adair's arrest on charges of 'collaboration'. Torn from her terrified sisters, she suddenly finds herself consigned to a living hell, caged in a filthy women's prison in St. Louis.
But young Adair is sustained by a strong heart, and love can live even in a place of horror and despair. Her interrogator, a Union major, falls in love with her and she finds herself reciprocating his feelings in spite of herself. The major vows to return for her when the fighting is over, and before he rejoins the war, he leaves her with a last precious gift: freedom.
Weakened in body but not in spirit, Adair must now travel alone through dangerous, unknown territory - an escaped 'enemy woman' surrounded by perils and misery on all sides. She makes her harrowing way south buoyed by a promise, seeking a home and a family that may be nothing more than a memory.
Based on a little-known chapter in America's bloodiest epoch, Paulette Jiles's poignant, powerful, and exquisitely rendered novel about war's collateral victims is a masterful work, captivating and authentic - a lyrical, memorable tale of endurance and sacrifice that, like Cold Mountain, will stand alongside classic Civil War-era literature for decades to come.
- ISBN10 0061337633
- ISBN13 9780061337635
- Publish Date 10 April 2007 (first published 1 January 2002)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint Collins
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 352
- Language English