I’ve been intrigued by this book since it won last year’s prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography (US).

This deeply affecting, superbly detailed memoir is a rare opportunity to learn about world trouble-spot Haiti from the inside – to understand the complex source of its troubles, how they play out, what it feels like to live there, what drives people to leave. It’s the classic migration story of divided lives and longing for the place and people left behind.

Acclaimed novelist Edwidge Danticat centres her story on the two men who were her emotional anchors growing up – her father, who migrated to Brooklyn when she was four, and her uncle Joseph, a charismatic preacher, who looked after her and her brother in Haiti until she finally, aged twelve, joined her parents in America. When pregnant with her first child, she learned her father was dying. Shortly after, her ‘second father’ Joseph was caught up in Haitian riots, fled to Miami, and died in an immigration prison. ‘I am writing this only because they can’t,’ she says. An amazing book.