The award-winning saga of a peasant family living in a small Haitian village, told through four generations of voices, recounting through stories of tradition and superstition, voodoo and the new gods, romance and violence, the lives of the women who struggled to hold the family together in an ever-shifting landscape of political turmoil and economic suffering.

Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings.In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Corossol Restaurant-Bar, when the broken, rich voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining i...

« To speak of Haiti and its literature differently one needs to ask oneself, through the words of its writers, what light the Haitian experience can shed on the French-speaking world, and perhaps on the world at large, in this day and age: how a civilisation – and one of which literature would be a major element – was founded on the grounds of an almost unthinkable historical event, namely a victorious revolution carried out in the late eighteenth century by men and women taken from Africa...

« Dire Haïti et sa littérature autrement, c’est se demander, à travers les mots de ses écrivains et de ses écrivaines, quel éclairage peut apporter aujourd’hui au monde francophone, sinon au monde tout court, l’expérience haïtienne. Comment, à partir d’un fait historique de l’ordre de l’impensable, à savoir une révolution victorieuse, menée dès la fin du xviiie siècle par des hommes et des femmes transplantés d’Afrique en Amérique et réduits en esclavage, se met en place une civilisation d...

Angélique levanta-se primeiro todas as manhãs, na casinha nos arredores de Porto Príncipe que divide com a mãe, a irmã Joyeuse e o irmão mais novo Fignolé. Numa madrugada cinzenta de fevereiro, a preocupação o domina: Fignolé não voltou e durante toda a noite os tiros não pararam de ressoar ao longe. Yanick Lahens, ao retratar com notável economia de meios o destino de uma família comum, constrói a alegoria de um país onde a monstruosidade gostaria de ser lei. Mas seu livro é pungente porq...

Port au Prince, Haiti. The police roam the streets and no-one is safe. Fignolé, musician and political radical is missing. His sisters Joyeuse and Angelique search for their young brother amid the colour, bustle, deprivation and political tension of the city. Everntually they will find him, but in the process they will also have found more about themselves than they wanted to know. One day and three lives in a city where love is hard to find, life is cheap and death is all too familioar. A...

Dans ce nouveau roman, comme arraché au chaos de son quotidien à Port-au-Prince, Yanick Lahens rend un hommage d'espoir et de résistance à la lignée des femmes dont elle est issue.La première d'entre elles, Élizabeth Dubreuil, naît vers 1820 à La Nouvelle-Orléans. Sa grand-mère, arrivée d'Haïti au début du siècle dans le sillage du maître de la plantation qui avait fini par l'affranchir, n'a plus jamais voulu dépendre d'un homme. Inspirée par ce puissant exemple, la jeune Élisabeth ...

Após três dias de tempestade, um pescador encontra, estendida na praia, uma jovem que parece ter escapado de uma grande violência. A voz dessa náufraga nos conduzirá pela história de três gerações que a precederam na tentativa de desvendar o duplo mistério de sua agressão e identidade. Os Lafleur sempre viveram em Baía Azul, um vilarejo de pescadores no Haiti, onde a terra e as águas se confundem. Há décadas convivem em ressentimento com os Mésidor, que, ao longo dos anos, se apropriaram d...

Gérald Bloncourt reprend la chronique des événements de 1946, ces moments intenses qui ont marqué sa vie. Il y porte un regard nostalgique et tendre. Ses amis de l’époque sont devenus des personnages un peu lointains. C’est son testament pour dire encore une fois son attachement inaltérable à sa terre d’Haïti.