The Dew Breaker - Hardcover

Danticat, Edwidge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041147 ISBN 13: 9781400041145

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf, 2004

Synopsis

From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a “dew breaker”—a torturer—a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality.

We meet him late in his life. He is a quiet man, a husband and father, a hardworking barber, a kindly landlord to the men who live in a basement apartment in his home. He is a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, recognizable by the terrifying scar on his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter; his sometimes unsuspecting, sometimes apprehensive neighbors, tenants, and clients. And we meet some of his victims.

In the book’s powerful denouement, we return to the Haiti of the dew breaker’s past, to his last, desperate act of violence, and to his first encounter with the woman who will offer him a form of redemption—albeit imperfect—that will change him forever.
The Dew Breaker is a book of interconnected lives—a book of love, remorse, and hope; of rebellions both personal and political; of the compromises we often make in order to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. Unforgettable, deeply resonant, The Dew Breaker proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a major American writer.

About this title

Review:

Remarkable...Danticat's most persuasive, organic performance yet. As seamless as it is compelling. (NEW YORK TIMES)

Riveting... Dandicat leads her readers into the underworld. It's furnished like home. (LOS ANGELES TIMES)

The episodic quality beautifully captures the fabric of this community and how it must weave itself together. (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY)

This excellent, unsettling novel is her finest, and a literary gem. (INDEPENDENT)

Book Description:

* A brilliant new novel on universal political themes in Haiti.
* An eloquent and powerful novel of interconnected lives which asks tough and emotive questions about life in a fascinating country.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400041147
• ISBN 13: 9781400041145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256