Edwidge Danticat

Brother, I'm Dying

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2007

From the best-selling author, a major work of nonfiction, her most personal book to date: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart—her father and his brother, Joseph.

This is the story of how Edwidge came to think of Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her ''second father'': placed in his care at the age of four, after her parents emigrated from Haiti to America, she becomes profoundly attached to him, experiencing a wrenching complication of emotion when, at twelve, she finally joins her parents. It's the story of weathering the challenges of life in America, while still fearing for the safety of those left in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. And it is the story of a dizzying intersection of life and death: when late in 2004, forced to flee his home, his life endangered, the eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he is detained by Customs, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. His brother, ill and grieving, soon follows him in death—but not before he holds in his arms Edwidge's firstborn, a girl who will bear his name into the next generation.

Brother, I'm Dying is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a tale of family and country, love and sorrow, and the triumph of hope over tragedy.

The Dew Breaker

We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat's brilliant exploration of the ''dew breaker''—or torturer—is an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. It firmly establishes her as one of America's most essential writers.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat became one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti's women—with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.

Krik? Krak!

When Haitians tell a story, they say ''Krik?'' and the eager listeners answer ''Krak!'' In Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty.