Enemy Women
By Paulette Jiles
(William Morrow Paperbacks, Paperback, 9780061337635, 352pp.)
Publication Date: April 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Audio Cassette, Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: Historical - General
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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.
An acclaimed poet, Paulette Jiles is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the bestselling novels Enemy Women and Stormy Weather. She lives on a small ranch west of San Antonio, Texas.
“Jiles has created an unsentimental yet tender world of destruction, despair, and hope that’s a joy to inhabit.”
-Entertainment Weekly
“Jiles paints the struggles of the era with the same intensity as Charles Frazier’s 1997 bestseller Cold Mountain …”
-People
“Comparing Enemy Women to Cold Mountain doesn’t quite do Jiles’s novel justice.”
-Washington Post
“ENEMY WOMEN deserves the Pulitzer Prize.”
-Toronto Globe and Mail
“…remarkable happens...it becomes inspired… Adair becomes a storyteller in order to survive. And so - triumphantly - does Paulette Jiles.”
-New York Times Book Review (cover)
“This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence.”
-New York Times
“Sure to be touted as a new COLD MOUNTAIN...stark, unsentimental, yet touching novel will not suffer in comparison.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A remarkable debut… Splendid.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“...[G]ifted Missouri historian...acutely portrays Missouri’s logistic misfortune as a hotbed of both Union and Confederate violence.”
-Booklist
“…beautifully written passages…a real page-turner.”
-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“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
“You know what it means when there is Paulette Jiles inside? Be smart. Open the book.”
-Gordon Lish
“ENEMY WOMEN...has a Homeresque feel to it. Like something written by an old soul.”
-Carolyn Chute
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