News of the World by Paulette Jiles

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

The suspense of True Grit meets the poignancy of The Orenda in a powerful novel that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust 1870. For many, civilization is only a dream. Towns and cities are separated by miles of perilous landscape and roads unprotected from Kiowa raids and unscrupulous lawmen. Here, in this world, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd makes his living. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the Captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. But that existence is disrupted when he is offered a fifty-dollar gold piece to deliver Johanna, an orphan, to her blood relatives. 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. Recently rescued, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their four-hundred-mile journey through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. 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, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land. Ultimately Johanna is reunited with her relatives and the Captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember-strangers who regard her as a burden. 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. Exquisitely rendered through the singular talent of Paulette Jiles, News of the World is a brilliant, morally complex work of historical fiction.

Jiles, Paulette: -

PAULETTE JILES was born in Salem, Missouri, in 1943 and moved to Toronto in 1969. Her poetry collection Celestial Navigation won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She lives in Utopia, Texas.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062573896
ISBN 10	0062573896
Title	News of the World
Author	Paulette Jiles
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2016-09-27
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable