Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cousins | 1992 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
| 2 | North Spirit | 1995 | Paulette Jiles | Buy |
Paulette Jiles’s two non-fiction books come from different parts of her life but share a common interest in place and how it shapes people. Cousins (1992) is a search through family history, following threads of genealogy and oral tradition across Missouri, Texas, and other parts of the American South. Jiles combines personal memory with archival research to reconstruct the lives of relatives she barely knew.
North Spirit (1995) records a very different kind of experience. During the 1980s, Jiles lived in a fly-in Ojibwe community in northern Ontario, hundreds of miles from the nearest road. She worked on a community radio project and became a participant in daily life in the settlement. The book describes what that life looked like in practical terms: the weather, the hunting, the isolation, and the relationships between the community and the outside institutions that tried to manage it. Both books show the observational eye and grounded prose style that would later carry over into her historical novels.