First published 2007
Edwidge Danticat recounts her family's painful separation across borders and decades. Some family members managed to leave Haiti for America while others remained behind, creating an ocean of distance between loved ones who desperately wanted to stay united. The author examines how immigration policies and economic necessity forced impossible choices on her relatives. She traces the different paths her family members took, some finding new lives in the United States while others stayed in Haiti and faced mounting political instability. Danticat shows how families maintain bonds across vast distances and how they cope when circumstances beyond their control pull them apart. The book reveals the human cost of immigration systems that treat families as collections of individuals rather than units that belong together. At its heart, this is a story about love persisting despite separation and the ways people fight to protect their connections to each other.
Genres: family, historical-fiction, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, separation
Setting: Haiti, United States
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
272 pages · Paperback · Knopf