When Worlds Collide

In Paulette Jiles’s News of the World: A Novel (William Morrow, $22.99) Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is a former soldier who travels around the frontier towns of 1870s Texas armed with newspapers from all over the world, reading the news of the day to eager audiences. Kidd agrees to take custody of a ten-year-old girl, Johanna Leonberger, who’d been captured by the Kiowa Indians four years earlier, and deliver her to her surviving relatives near San Antonio. The girl, who has forgotten English and become fully Kiowa, has no desire to return. The unlikely pair embark on an unforgettable 400-mile journey across Texas, eluding outlaws, hostile Indian raiders and the elements. Written in Jiles’s spare, beautifully crafted prose, this short novel really delivers.

—Patrick Millikin, editor of The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers and Dark Roads

The hero of Paulette Jiles’s News of the World: A Novel, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd is sent on an epic odyssey to return a white girl—who’d been held captive by a Kiowa tribe for four years—to her family, despite her reluctance to leave her adopted Kiowa kin. – Courtesy Library of Congress – — The hero of Paulette Jiles’s News of the World: A Novel, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd is sent on an epic odyssey to return a white girl—who’d been held captive by a Kiowa tribe for four years—to her family, despite her reluctance to leave her adopted Kiowa kin.
– Courtesy Library of Congress –

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