Published in 2024
288 pages
8 hours and 47 minutes
Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, winner of the2023 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.
What is this book about?
An epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville’s “public women,” an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female
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 a Union spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with a 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 its ancient mission to confront and eradicate the violence of 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.
