Set in Texas oil country during the Great Depression, the story traces the lives of four women, a widow and her three daughters, as they struggle to hold farm and family together in a hardscrabble world of dust storms, despair, and deprivation.

In her second novel, 2007's Stormy Weather, Jiles mined another rich trove of American history. Janet Maslin raved in the New York Times, 'This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence by an author determined to capture the immediacy of he heroine's wartime odyssey.' The book won the Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction (U.S.) and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Canada). Ten years later, she made her fiction debut with Enemy Women (2002), the survival story of an 18-year-old woman caged with the criminally insane in a St. In 1992, Jiles published Cousins, a beguiling memoir that interweaves adventure and romance into a search for her family roots. In 1984, she won the Governor General's Award (Canada's highest literary honor) for Celestial Navigation, a collection of poems lauded by the Toronto Star as '.fiercely interior and ironic, with images that can mow the reader down.' She spent eight years as a journalist in Canada, before turning to writing poetry. Poet, memoirist, and novelist Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969 after graduating with a degree in Romance languages from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Currently-lives near San Antonio, Texas.

Paulette jiles books