Paulette Jiles Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Golden Hawks (1978)
  2. Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola (1986)
  3. The Late Great Human Road Show (1986)
  4. Enemy Women (2002)
  5. Stormy Weather (2007)
  6. The Color of Lightning (2009)
  7. Lighthouse Island (2013)
  8. News of the World (2016)
  9. Simon the Fiddler (2020)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Waterloo Express (1973)
  2. Celestial Navigation (1984)
  3. The Jesse James Poems (1988)
  4. Blackwater (1988)
  5. Song to the Rising Sun (1989)
  6. Flying Lesson (1995)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Cousins (1992)
  2. North Spirit (1995)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Paulette Jiles Books Overview

The Golden Hawks

The Golden Hawks want a clubhouse of their own. But where can they find one in their new housing development on the edge of the city?

First they try to make their clubhouse in Joe’s bedroom, but their parents get angry when the kids hammer holes in the wall. Then they scare themselves silly looking for scrap wood in an empty and spooky apartment building. Finally they try to make money so they can build a clubhouse. Will The Golden Hawks ever have a place to call their own?

First published in 1978, The Golden Hawks is an honest and touching look at life on the edge of a Canadian city. A volume in the Where We Live series.

Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola

With the spark and zest of a gin fizz, Paulette Jiles invites readers along on an unforgettable rail trip. Our hatted hero*ine, a Katharine Hepburn type, is leaving America, escaping to Canada, hoping to find her Spencer Tracy somewhere in the Dome Car between Vancouver and points east. This hero*ine on the run soon finds her handsome man who happens to be a detective pursuing her. Acclaimed by The New York Times as ‘the best train story since Mary McCarthy’s The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, ‘ Sitting in the Club Car is an elegant, illustrated, witty romp that combines an old fashioned love story with period detective fiction.

Enemy Women

From critically acclaimed, award winning poet and memoirist Paulette Jiles comes a debut novel of startling power and savage beauty an extraordinary story of survival and love in the midst of a torn nation’s bitter agony.

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 seen at its most terrible on the day 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, as they start out on foot into the winter mountains in search of a safe haven.

Even the least of hopes is doomed, however, in a world forever changed, as the treachery of a fellow traveler brings about Adair’s arrest on charges of enemy collaboration. Torn from her terrified sisters, the girl suddenly finds herself consigned to a living hell, caged with the criminal and the deranged 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 returning her feelings despite herself. The major vows to return for her when the fighting is over, and before he returns to 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 masterful work, captivating and authentic a lyrical, memorable tale of endurance and sacrifice that will stand alongside Cold Mountain and other classic Civil War era set literature for decades to come.

Stormy Weather

Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls responsible Mayme, whip smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks; that is, when he’s not spending his meager earnings at gambling joints, race tracks, and dance halls. And in every small town in which the windblown family settles, mother Elizabeth does her level best to make each sparse, temporary house they inhabit a home. But the fall of 1937 ushers in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, and the family’s fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable ‘accident’ leaves Elizabeth and her girls alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times. With no choice left to them, they return to the abandoned family farm. It is Jeanine, proud and stubborn, who single mindedly devotes herself to rebuilding the farm and their lives. But hard work and good intentions won’t make ends meet or pay the back taxes they owe on their land. In desperation, the Stoddard women place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left…
and on the back of late patriarch Jack’s one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe. And Jeanine, the fatherless ‘daddy’s girl,’ must decide if she will gamble it all…
on love.

The Color of Lightning

In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies.

Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.

Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond’s goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post& 150;Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

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