Paulette Jiles Books in Order

Recovering from a devastating head wound, former soldier John Chenneville learns that a corrupt lawman has murdered his sister's family and rides west through the lawless borderlands of Reconstruction, pursuing a slow, relentless quest for justice that forces him to reckon with grief and vengeance.

Near the end of the Civil War, itinerant musician Simon Boudlin is finally dragged into the Confederate army, then thrown back into civilian life with only his fiddle, a makeshift band, and an instant, impractical love for an Irish governess to guide him through ruined Texas.

In 1870 Texas, aging war veteran Captain Jefferson Kidd makes his living reading newspapers aloud in small towns until he agrees to escort ten year old Johanna, recently freed from Kiowa captivity, on a hazardous journey to relatives who feel like strangers.

In a distant future when the continent has become one sprawling, drought stricken city, orphan Nadia Stepan survives by constantly reinventing herself and clinging to stories of Lighthouse Island, a half real, half imagined refuge she is determined to reach.

After a Kiowa Comanche raid shatters his frontier settlement, freedman Britt Johnson sets out across post Civil War Texas to recover his captured family, while a well meaning Quaker Indian agent confronts his own limits in a landscape of clashing loyalties and brutal choices.

In Depression era Texas, the Stoddard sisters and their mother retreat to a rundown family farm after their charming, reckless father dies, gambling on a wildcat oil well and a dangerous racehorse while dust storms, debts, and first loves test their resolve.

In Civil War era Missouri, eighteen year old Adair Colley sees her neutral family's farm destroyed, is jailed as an enemy sympathizer in a grim St. Louis prison, and must rely on her wits, stubborn hope, and a risky love to survive and find home again.

North Spirit recounts seven demanding years Jiles spent in remote northern Ontario, helping create Indigenous radio stations and learning Cree and Ojibway star lore, as she navigates brutal winters, small daily crises, and the uneasy meeting of modern media and traditional life.

Gathering poems from roughly a decade of work, Flying Lesson moves between the frozen interior of the Canadian north and the smoky bars of ragtime America, telling compact narrative scenes where music, weather, and memory quietly redirect people's lives.

This memoir follows Jiles and her partner on a looping road trip through the American South to meet long lost cousins, blending interviews, roadside mishaps, and sharp self reflection as she probes family myths, class, and the tug of home.

In this hybrid volume of poems and adapted radio scripts, Jiles returns to the talkative neighbors of her Missouri childhood and to Arctic landscapes, capturing family lore, northern weather, and the hum of community radio in incantatory, story driven lines.

This sequence of poems revisits the legend of Frank and Jesse James through collage, ballad rhythms, and shifting narrators, mixing court records, frontier gossip, and imagined monologues to question how outlaw stories are told and retold.

Blackwater brings together a wide selection of Jiles's work, including the Jesse James poems, earlier pieces from Waterloo Express and Celestial Navigation, and quirky short prose, offering a rich sampler of her fascination with violence, travel, and odd, intimate voices.

Set in a post nuclear Toronto stripped of fresh food, fuel, and television, this darkly comic novel follows resourceful survivors as they trade stories, improvise entertainment, and stubbornly assemble meaning from the ruins of a familiar world.

A broke young woman boards a transcontinental train to escape a mountain of unpaid bills and finds herself caught up in flirtations, small cons, and a half serious mystery in a witty parody of old pulp detective tales.

This award-winning poetry collection blends Missouri back roads, city apartments, and invented oracles, using bold metaphors and overlapping voices to explore how women remember, retell, and sometimes rewrite the stories that have shaped their lives.

In a new housing development on the edge of a Canadian city, a gang of kids called the Golden Hawks just want a clubhouse, scrambling through bedrooms, abandoned buildings, and odd jobs as they chase the stubborn dream of a place of their own.

Jiles's debut collection gathers story-like poems that move from Africa and Mexico to Toronto, following travelers, workers, and lovers in quick, vivid scenes where everyday speech tilts suddenly into dreamlike, unsettling insight.