Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls—responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea—know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks. But in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves the girls and their mother, Elizabeth, alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times.

Returning to their previously abandoned family farm, the resilient Stoddard women must now place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left . . . and on the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe.

PAULETE JILES was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969. She spent eight years as a journalist for the CBC in northern Ontario. She is the bestselling author of Enemy Women, a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Women Writing the West’s Willa Literary Award. She has also won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Paulette Jiles lives in the Texas hill country near San Antonio.

Paulette Jiles' profile page

“Jiles’s follow-up to her highly praised debut, Enemy Women, [is] a deeply satisfying novel with wide appeal.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“Jiles’s eloquent, engaging novel celebrates four strong women toughing out the Great Depression . . . [a] gritty saga.” — Publishers Weekly

“[A] stirring story . . . of self and home in language as spare and stark as the Texas landscape.” — Booklist