Hill Country Pages: ‘News of the World’ by Paulette Jiles

by Megan Willome

Paulette Jiles has written numerous books, including memoir, nonfiction, and poetry, but she is best known for her 2016 National Book Award finalist, “News of the World.”

At a public reading in June at Ursa at Branch on High in Comfort, Jiles read excerpts of “Song to the Rising Sun,” a poem from her collection “Flying Lesson,” and selections from her forthcoming novel, “The Solitary Telegrapher,” due out next year. When it was time to take questions, most of them were about “News of the World.”

It’s not a long novel—only 240 pages. Her editor said it could be longer, but Jiles has a sense about these things: “I’ve come to the end,” she told her editor. “It’s like salt precipitating out of a salt solution, and it crystallizes.”

“News of the World” is a journey story, set in 1870s Texas. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 71-year-old war veteran, must return a girl named Johanna to her German relatives, 400 miles away. The story has been described as “Lonesome Dove” meets “True Grit.”

Captured four years earlier by the Kiowa, Johanna has no memories—and no interest—in her prior life. When she meets Captain Kidd, she does not speak, but this is what she is thinking, in the Kiowa language of “tonal music [that] lived in her head like bees.”

“My name is Cicada. My father’s name is Turning Water. My mother’s name is Three Spotted. I want to go home.”

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