Youthful struggles

When her Missouri home is torched by Union soldiers and her father beaten and taken from her, 18-year-old Adair Colley is plunged into the bitter and bloody chaos of the American Civil War. She embarks on a quest to rescue her father but finds herself denounced as a Confederate spy and thrown into jail. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of an attractive - and attracted - Union major who engineers her escape.

Thereafter Adair is on a new mission - to get back home - and her real aim is survival itself. It's the way in which she achieves this that makes this book special. Like that more celebrated American literary character Huckleberry Finn, Adair is a fabulist of gigantic talent, able to improvise new identities and histories for herself, to lie and invent on the wing, and her stories get her through some hairy situations to an ending, which, if sentimental, is told unsentimentally. Despite the claims made for it, Cold Mountain it is not, but Paulette Jiles's debut is nonetheless impressive. It lacks only a convincing sense of sexual threat to the heroine, something one would expect to be ever-present for women caught up in such a dirty war.