But there is a $50 gold piece to be made, and he would be doing a favour for his friend Britt Johnson, a former slave turned hard-working teamster/entrepreneur (and the protagonist of Jiles's earlier novel The Color of Lightning).Ĭaptain Kidd, an itinerant former newspaper publisher, updates, educates and entertains the far-flung frontier communities by reading from newspapers. It promises to be a long, difficult journey, and Kidd is reluctant to take it on. She has been "rescued" – purchased is more like it, "for fifteen Hudson's Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware" – but has forgotten whatever English she knew, and keeps trying to escape and return to her Kiowa family.
Her name is Johanna Leonberger, captured and adopted four years before by Kiowa raiders, who killed the rest of her German immigrant family. The story of News of the World, set in Texas in 1870, begins when 71-year-old Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a widower and a veteran of two wars, is asked to transport a 10-year-old girl to her relatives near San Antonio. It's set in the Old West, after all, and features a tough, likeable old codger, a troubled, troublesome young girl and a harsh and unforgiving landscape. The elevator pitch for Paulette Jiles's new novel, News of the World, just announced as a finalist for the National Book Awards, would be something like True Grit meets Lonesome Dove, maybe with a little Cormac McCarthy thrown in for seasoning.
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