The Dew Breaker

PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction (nominee)

From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, memory and Krik?Krak! (both Opera's Book Club selections), a powerful new work of fiction that explores the trials and reconciliations in the life of a man known as a 'dew breaker,' a torturer, whose past crimes in the country of his birth, lie hidden beneath his new American relaity. In Haiti in the dictatorial 1960's, Manhattan in the 1970s, Brooklyn and Queens today, we meet the dew breaker's family, neighbours, and victims. An unforgettable, deeply resonant book – of love, remorse, history, and hope, of rebellions both personal and political – The Dew Breaker proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a major American writer.

“Breathtaking… With terrifying wit and flowered pungency, Edwidge Danticat has managed over the past 10 years to portray the torment of the Haitian people… In The Dew Breaker, Danticat has written a Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers.” – The New York Times Book Review

“Danticat

“Thrillingly topical…

“Stunning… Beautifully written fiction

“Fascinating… Danticat is a fine and serious fiction writer who has slowly grown as an artist with each book she has written.” – Chicago Tribune

“In its varied characters, its descriptive power and its tightly linked images and themes,

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“With her grace and her imperishable humanity…

“Danticat has an emotional imagination capable of evoking empathy for both predator and prey.” – Entertainment Weekly

“With characteristic lyricism and grace, Danticat probes the painful legacy of a time when sons turned against their fathers, children were orphaned, and communities were torn apart.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Delicate and poetic… Danticat

“Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose… An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.” – People

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“In these stories Edwidge Danticat continues to speak eloquently for those who in losing their sorrowful homeland have lost their voices.” – The Boston Globe

“Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat presents simple truths… this, the novelist seems to be saying, is how you understand; here is the primer for survival.” – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution