Désirée Congo

Description: The newest English translation of one of Haiti's most powerful literary voices

Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot--one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world--constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon's imperial forces--a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

Brief description: Prize-winning author Évelyne Trouillot lives in Port-au-Prince and teaches French at the Université d'État d'Haïti. Her novel, La mémoire aux abois garnered the prestigious Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe and was released in English as Memory at Bay (University of Virginia Press, 2015).

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From its meticulously researched historical detail to its three-dimensional characters and compelling subplots, Désirée Congo has something for everyone. Readers who know (or thought they knew) everything or nothing at all about the Haitian Revolution will be met with an epic, chest-swelling reminder of what it means, what it takes, and what's it's worth to live free.