It’s as transporting and stirring a western as you’re likely to read this year-an opinion apparently shared by the National Book Foundation, which just this morning named it to the ten-book longlist for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction, the first time Jiles has been so honored. Set in Texas just after the Civil War, the book recounts the adventures of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Confederate veteran passing through Wichita Falls who assumes the dangerous task of returning a ten-year-old girl who has been taken captive by a band of Kiowa to her family in South Texas. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become-in the eyes of the law-a kidnapper himself.This month William Morrow will publish News of the World, the sixth novel by Paulette Jiles, a 73-year-old poet, novelist, memoirist, and resident of the Hill Country town of Utopia. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember-strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.Īrriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

News of the world paulette