Access Denied
IMPORTANT! If you’re a store owner, please make sure you have Customer accounts enabled in your Store Admin, as you have customer based locks set up with EasyLockdown app. Enable Customer Accounts
Daughters of Chaos
A Novel
Out of Stock- Regular price
- $39.99
- Sale price
- $39.99
- Regular price
-
- Unit price
- / per
Award-winning author Jen Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos is an epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville’s “public women,” a secret society spanning millennia, and the earth-shaking power of the female.
“A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.” ––Kevin Brockmeier, three-time O. Henry Prize-winning author
The year is 1862. After a tragedy at home, 22-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, the Union Army’s western headquarters, bustling with soldiers and saboteurs, partisans and powerful men––and powerful women.
Sylvie works on a translation of the playscript by day, but at night, under the direction of the Army’s Secret Service Chief, she acts as Union spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with an ancient sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess uncanny, and potentially monstrous, powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a mystical feminist society steadfast in their age-old mission to confront and eradicate the violent injustices enacted by men.
Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, sly humor, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power. Inspired by both Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the Civil War, this debut novel journeys through Ancient Greece, Renaissance Venice, and a 19th-century America torn apart by conflict.
“A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.” ––Kevin Brockmeier, three-time O. Henry Prize-winning author
The year is 1862. After a tragedy at home, 22-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, the Union Army’s western headquarters, bustling with soldiers and saboteurs, partisans and powerful men––and powerful women.
Sylvie works on a translation of the playscript by day, but at night, under the direction of the Army’s Secret Service Chief, she acts as Union spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with an ancient sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess uncanny, and potentially monstrous, powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a mystical feminist society steadfast in their age-old mission to confront and eradicate the violent injustices enacted by men.
Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, sly humor, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power. Inspired by both Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the Civil War, this debut novel journeys through Ancient Greece, Renaissance Venice, and a 19th-century America torn apart by conflict.
Praise for Daughters of Chaos
“A dazzling synthesis of history, myth, and sheer invention. Fawkes is a bold, wild, funny writer, unafraid of taking risks. I’m eager to see what she does next.”
Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown
“Jen Fawkes’s writing—and her characters—are ferociously, radiantly compelling in Daughters of Chaos. Like the best historical fiction, this speaks to the reader and the times in which she lives.”
Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
“The stunning cover of Daughters of Chaos fits the story inside: a red cover with claw marks opening up fragments of a hidden story that lies beneath. Fawkes’s novel, an utterly wild tale about Civil War ‘public women,’ translation, mythology, submarines, all wrapped up in subversion and resistance, will make good on the promise of that cover.”
Kevin Wilson, Elle
“Daughters of Chaos lives up to its name! Celebrating the messiness of women’s lives and struggles against the backdrop of the Civil War, Daughters of Chaos delivers a world that feels both real and surreal, a history that is itself steeped in our primordial stories about who we can and cannot be and who we can and cannot love.”
Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw
About the Author
Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award, and a Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her collection Tales the Devil Told Me was a Foreword INDIES silver medalist, a Largehearted Boy Favorite Collection of 2021, and a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Her fiction won the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize and has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions, and more. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
You May Also Like
View more
This product currently has no recommended items.
Sign up to our Newsletter
Our weekly newsletter is a curated collection of interviews, articles, stunning images and books we think you’ll love. Sign up to get 20% off.
In accordance with our privacy policy, you may unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid password
Enter
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.