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. 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. Set in post-Civil War Texas, Paulette Jiles’ latest novel, News of the World, tells the story of 71-year-old Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd and his unlikely ward, a 10-year-old girl rescued by the U.S. 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. She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.

She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, Lighthouse Island, and News of the World, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. Paulette Jiles is a novelist, poet, and memoirist. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this morally complex, multi-layered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.Ĭaptain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world.

News of the world by paulette jiles