News of the World

Texas, 1870. 70-year-old Captain Kidd has agreed to transport a European girl - rescued from the Kiowa tribe that kidnapped her when she was four - back to her only surviving relatives, 900 miles south outside San Antonio.

On the journey he will practice his profession – holding readings from the various newspapers he’s collected, bringing ‘news of the world’ to small, far-flung communities. He will negotiate passage through towns where one’s allegiance in the recently ended civil war might well determine whether he lives or dies. He will defend his 10-year-old charge from murderers who want to steal her and set her to work as a prostitute.

And he will attempt to understand and communicate with a little girl who no longer remembers her parents, cannot speak their language and whose entire soul and being is now Kiowa.

There aren’t really any surprises in this story. There’s not even a lot of ‘action’- although the passage in which he takes on the murderers with dwindling ammunition and poor eyesight is absolutely gripping. And reading it, you have a fairly good idea from the start how it will end. And yet.

And yet it’s a book that draws you in, page by page, and keeps you there, entrancing you with its language, its portrait of 1870 Texas, its characters, its incidents. It’s not a thriller and there’s little violence – apart from the aforementioned gunfight – and there isn’t any real attempt by the author to make you keep turning the pages. No cliff-hanger chapter endings.

But you do. You keep reading, happy I think to sink into this gently-told story of a world going about its daily business. I think that’s the book’s secret: Paulette Jiles has brought a long-gone world and way of life back to life. In all its aspects: rain, transport, food, work, shelter, addressing strangers, dealing with good people, dealing with bad people.

Life, 1870-style.