Daughters of Chaos

Award-winning author Jen Fawkes's DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS is an epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville’s “public women,” an age-old secret society, & the earth-shaking power of the female.

In 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, saboteurs, powerful men––& 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 endeavors acquaint her with a sisterhood whose members--including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn--possess uncanny, & potentially monstrous, powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a mystical feminist society steadfast in its ancient mission to confront & eradicate the violence of men.

Inspired by both Aristophanes’ Lysistrata & the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the Civil War, Daughters of Chaosweaves together "found" texts, fabulism, & queer themes to question familiar notions of history & family, warfare & power.

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“In Daughters of Chaos, priestesses of an ancient cult of female power control men with their song. Posing as prostitutes in a Nashville brothel known as the Land of the Sirens, they covertly teach their customers about the women who’ve shaped our world, after which their clients—convinced they’ve had the wildest, most passionate night of their lives—can’t wait to return for further indoctrination…

Not only can these songstresses peel the paint right off the walls, they also have plenty to say about surviving as a woman in a patriarchal world while complicating binaries such as sacred/profane, order/chaos, & male/female.” — Author Jen Fawkes