Why read The Dew Breaker?

Book cover of The Dew Breaker

Book description

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…

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Short story collections

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Dew Breaker as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Joanne C. Hillhouse

Author

It is a beautiful and aching; filled with lingering characters, flashes of brutal violence and almost-connections.

It is a window to the beauty and pain that is Haiti – past and present. It is both grounded and magical – clearly well-researched but soulful. Probing and yet sensitive. Artfully done.

It is not a collection of short stories but vignettes that are part of a single narrative terror, trauma, and survival, starting over, and ghosts of the past that linger. The characters are vivid, the language is lovely, the stories are grounded, and...life is unforgiving to some and too forgiving to…

From Joanne's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Michele Wucker

Author

The work of this rightfully acclaimed Haitian-American writer spans nonfiction and fiction, weaving historical memory in with present-day Haiti. This 2004 novel, told through related short stories, draws its title from the name of torturers under the regimes of the Duvaliers, father and son: François “Papa Doc” from 1957 to 1971 and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” from 1971 until a popular uprising sent him into exile in 1986. Danticat draws on that period as well as contemporary issues like the ordeals of immigrants; the police killing of Haitian immigrant Patrick Dorismond in New York in 2000; the FRAPH government thugs who…

From Michele's list on understanding Haiti.