Paulette Jiles books

Non-Fiction

Paulette Jiles Non-Fiction Reading Order

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Paulette Jiles was born in 1943 in Salem, Missouri, and grew up in the Ozarks before moving to Canada, where she spent over two decades. She began publishing poetry in the early 1970s with Waterloo Express (1973) and went on to win the Governor General’s Award for Celestial Navigation (1984) and the Pat Lowther Award for other work. Her poetry is rooted in landscape and place, drawing on her experiences living in remote areas of northern Ontario, including time spent in an Ojibwe community near Hudson Bay.

Jiles turned to fiction with Enemy Women (2002), a novel set during the Civil War in Missouri about a young woman imprisoned by Union militia. She continued writing historical novels set in 19th-century Texas and the American frontier. The Color of Lightning (2009) tells the story of a freed slave and a Kiowa captive in post-Civil War Texas. News of the World (2016), about an aging news reader who agrees to transport a young girl across Texas, became a National Book Award finalist and was adapted into a 2020 film starring Tom Hanks. Simon the Fiddler (2020) follows a Confederate musician trying to find the woman he loves in the chaos after the war. Her most recent novel, Chenneville (2023), is a revenge story set in the same period.