Jen Fawkes

AN EPIC NOVEL ABOUT CIVIL WAR–ERA NASHVILLE’S “PUBLIC WOMEN,” AN AGE-OLD SECRET SOCETY, AND THE EARTH-SHAKING POWER OF THE FEMALE

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In 1862, after a tragedy at home, 22-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their door-step. It leads her to Nashville, bustling with soldiers, saboteurs, partisans, powerful men––and powerful women.

Sylvie translates the playscript by day, but at night, she acts as a Union spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with a sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess potentially monstrous powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a feminist society steadfast in its ancient mission to eradicate the violence of men.
 

Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the Civil War, Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power.

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“In her elemental inventiveness, Jen Fawkes is descended from the Angela Carter of Wise Children and The Bloody Chamber but is also up to something exhilaratingly new. Daughters of Chaos is joyful and bold, populated so richly with twins and prostitutes and mythical creatures and historical figures that in the great thrill of watching its tapestry unfurl, the enormity and seriousness of the questions Fawkes is asking snuck up on me. This novel is interested in nothing less than the forces of chaos and order and the question of where lies threat and where salvation. Ambitious, vast, expertly crafted—an extraordinary achievement.”  

—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

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