Daughters of Chaos

Award-winning author Jen Fawkes's Daughters of Chaos is an epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville’s “public women,” a secret society spanning millennia, and the earth-shaking power of the female.

“A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.” ––Kevin Brockmeier, three-time O. Henry Prize-winning author

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 endeavours acquaint her with an ancient 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 their age-old mission to confront and eradicate the violent injustices enacted by men.

Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, sly humour, 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.