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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.
What books have you enjoyed so far in 2025, what books are you looking forward to reading?
...atures by Shelby Van Pelt Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles And a few of the books I'm looking forward to the rest of the year are Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon The Memory Polic...
-Thomas_Maurino
What are you reading this week? (8/14/2025)
I'm reading Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles, and on the Non-Fiction side it's The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson.
-Thomas_Maurino
"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)
"…beautifully written passages…a real page-turner." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"...[G]ifted Missouri historian...acutely portrays Missouri's logistic misfortune as a hotbed of both Union and Confederate violence." —Booklist
This information about Enemy Women was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paulette Jiles is a novelist, poet, and memoirist. She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, Lighthouse Island, Simon the Fiddler, and News of the World, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
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