I’m not proud of the fact that I sometimes understand an event or era only after reading a work of fiction set in the particular time or place. Of course, I knew in broad outline about recent decades in Haiti, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, and the Tonton Macoutes. The interwoven stories in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker take us back and forth in time and from New York City to Haiti, and the slow accretion of detail finally communicates the effect felt by the ones who stayed and the ones who left. What is the ideal intersection on a life map of horror and relief, of resistance and accommodation, of forgetting and forgiveness? Are there some sins that cannot be redeemed, and if so, who ought to be the judge? This novel is not overtly political and Danticat doesn’t even tell us who the good guys are; the bad guys need no explicit identification, of course. If we didn’t already understand the complexity of the lives of modern Haitians (and by extension, that of people from every hotspot on the map), this novel helps.