A spellbinding story about a renowned Nashville brothel during the Civil War, a centuries-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of women—charged with suspense, mystery, and sapphic romance.
DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS
by Jen Fawkes
The Overlook Press, July 2024
The year is 1862, and the United States Civil War is in full force. After a harrowing tragedy at home, 19-year-old Sylvie Swift finds herself living in a brothel in Nashville, the Union headquarters, a river city overflowing with soldiers, commanders, politicians, and powerful men––and powerful women. Targeted by a Union colonel and trained to be a spy against suspected Confederate secret societies, Sylvie suddenly finds herself neck-deep in an underground world she never expected: Also at work in Nashville is a centuries-old feminist cult populated by the women Sylvie thought she knew, including Hannah, a revolutionary with whom Sylvie falls headfirst into a heart-wrenching romance. She soon becomes entwined in the lives of the Daughters of Chaos, steadfast in their centuries-long mission to confront and eradicate the injustices enacted by the men who think they’re in charge.
Inspired both by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, about women who strategically withhold sex from their warring men, and by the true story of Nashville’s attempt to ban its “public women” during wartime, DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS journeys through Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and American history as Sylvie navigates the complex mythology of this secret world of women against the backdrop of a transformative American conflict.
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 Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her collection Tales the Devil Told Me was a Foreword INDIES silver medal recipient, Largehearted Boy Favorite Collection of 2021, and 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, Crazyhorse, Best Small Fictions, and more. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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