Series: P.S.

Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

Published 1 January 2002

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.

Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

Published 8 May 2007

From the author of the critically acclaimed 'Enemy Women' comes a brilliant new work of fiction set against the dark days of the Great Depression. Jeanine Stodard sees her family's future rise with each new oil rig that emerges from the Texas hills, and fall with her father's trips out to the dance halls and gambling joints in each new town they set up in. But when her father dies, in dubious circumstances, he leaves behind four women who have no place to go but the abandoned family farm. Elizabeth, her father's widow, invests the last of their money in a million-to-one shot oil well; Mayme, the eldest daughter, applies for a job at the oil company in her tattered dress and dreams of her Prince Charming; Bea, the youngest, scribbles stories in her Big Chief pad and dreams of being a writer; Jeanine, the proud, stubborn middle child, finds the threads of her life woven together of the old Tolliver homestead in surprising ways. They all share but one inheritance left them by their no-good father Jack Stoddard: a dangerous, racing stallion named Smoky Joe.
In dark and affecting prose, Paulette Jiles illuminates the hardship, sacrifice and strength of an ordinary family caught short by circumstances beyond their control.