Kasser Al Nada

Translation: Noura Al-Kharashi Number of pages: 224 In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat weaves a rich series of interconnected stories about a mysterious central character, an immigrant from Haiti to the United States, who reveals to his artistic daughter that he is not, as she believes, a fugitive from prison, but a former prison guard skilled in torture and other methods of violent control of a brutal regime. He confesses: "Your father was the hunter, not the prey." In this remarkable opening, Danticat seeds all of the following: stories of the victims of prison guards, their families, those who recognize him after decades on the streets of New York, and those who never saw him again but are haunted to the point that they believe he is still stalking them. (We know that the dew breaker is a government official who comes early in the morning to arrest someone or burn a house, and breaks the dew on the grass he crosses.) Although it is sometimes frustrating to abandon one narrative to follow another, The Dew Breaker is a beautifully crafted novel that rewinds the spool to the prison guard after his redemption in the end, while bearing the issue of redemption without an answer. --Regina Marler