What Storm, What Thunder

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses began to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shook the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. In stunningly intricate prose, award-winning author Myriam J.A. Chancy charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster, recounting the devastation for a wealthy, expat water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker who pines for a beautiful call girl; the call girl and her business partner, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; his teenage sister who longs for the life she sees in a telenovela; a grieving mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son who haunts them both; and the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Elegantly weaving together these lives, witness is given to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man.

Though the earthquake lasted for only forty-five seconds, over 250,000 people died, 1.3 million more were injured, and 1.5 million were left homeless and adrift. Chancy reckons with the unimaginable loss for those on the ground, for Haitians watching monuments fall on television screens, for anyone with a personal tie to its people and its land. Multilayered and deeply felt, the story of lives entwining and splitting against a backdrop of a city teeming with despair is a heartbreaking record of disaster and--at the same time--a testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.