Enemy Women - Softcover

."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)

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

."beautifully written passages.a real page-turner." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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.