Excerpt from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Inside the camp box he found a hard and shriveled leather folder. It was blackened on the edges from a burning, and inside were fragments and sometimes whole pages of letters.

It took a few moments for him to make sense of handwriting; handwriting itself. He finally understood that the black letters were all on one plane. On a flat surface. They came up out of a kind of obscure matrix and took form.

Finally there it was. First Lt. Chenneville to board the Intrepid for limited tethered flight over Yorktown there to observe and report ... His relief was enormous. He sat on his cot in his drawers, holding the scorched paper in both hands. He was suspended in thought for a long time. Such pleasing fires. The swaying great hot-air sack named the Intrepid lifting into the dark sky on an order of physical properties heretofore unknown. All Yorktown below him and something alight on the docks.

And there too was the small portrait of his sister Lalie. It was in a folding case, framed in gilt, a daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were going out of fashion, but the newer ambrotypes had none of their mystery nor their beauty. They were washed in a gold solution, which gave them depth and fine detail and their sitters a haunting immortality. He looked at it, searching out her voice and manner, hidden in the blacks and golds. Then he put it back in its moleskin bag. He couldn't concentrate on handwriting for more than a short space of time and closed the box. After that he slept again, for the entire day and the night afterward.

The next morning he lifted a straight razor to his jaw, and his hand shook so that the blade glittered. He tried anyway, but he cut himself, and so laid the razor down. He took up his two canes and went in search of a barber. The young male nurse finished filling pitchers of water on John's row and then hurried after him.

John sat in a chair out in the sun while an orderly shaved him and then clipped his hair down soldier-short, on doctor's orders. The clippers ran like teeth over the long scar. John shut his hands together with a tense precision as if pain were a mathematical problem, as if he had just solved it and the solution did not include making a noise if he could help it. Sweat ran down his face.

The male attendant stood at John's shoulder and watched with interest. He unfolded a shawl and tucked it around John's shoulders. It was cream-colored and in several different decorative weaves. John had no idea where it had come from.

The orderly insisted on rebandaging his head, looping clean strips of linen around his skull.

The young attendant waved a hand. "Don't you worry, sir. I've had plenty of head injuries. Men hauled in here with their brains hanging out, and before you know it, they're playing the piano and reading Deuteronomy without missing a word."

"What about dancing?"

"Schottisches only. Regulations. No jigs, no high kicks."

John gave him a brief smile and remembered that the young man's name was Lemuel. He was very thin and had thick, mud-colored hair. John slowly took the mirror that the barber handed him and looked at his own face for the first time in a long time.

It was himself; eyes hollowed and deep and the light irises glittering out of two caves of shadow. His upper lip thickened and broad like a boxer's that had been hit too many times. His skin was devoid of color, and the band of his shirt collar was too large. He handed the mirror back. He was doing much better. He knew his own name now and remembered things. When they brought him in, the stretcher men didn't know who he was. He didn't know who he was either, but now he possessed, like treasures, his own name and the place where he was from.

"It will all come back," said the barber and nodded in an encouraging way.

"I intend for it to come back," John said. He lay back against the shawl, frail, transparent. "Where did this shawl come from?"

Excerpted from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles. Copyright © 2023 by Paulette Jiles. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.