God Loves Haiti

by Dimitry Elias Leger

Overview

A native of Haiti, Dimitry Elias Léger makes his remarkable debut with this story of romance, politics, and religion that traces the fates of three lovers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the challenges they face readjusting to life after an earthquake devastates their city.

Reflecting the chaos of disaster and its aftermath, God Loves Haiti switches between time periods and locations, yet always moves closer to solving the driving mystery at its center: Will the artist Natasha Robert reunite with her one true love, the injured Alain Destiné, and live happily ever after? Warm and constantly surprising, told in the incandescent style of José Saramago and Roberto Bolaño, and reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s hauntingly beautiful Love in The Time of Cholera, God Loves Haiti is an homage to a lost time and city, and the people who embody it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062348135
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dimitry Elias Léger was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Educated at St. John's University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he is a former staff writer at the Miami Herald, Fortune magazine, and the Source magazine, and also a contributor to the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Face magazine in the UK. In 2010 he worked as an adviser to the United Nations' disaster recovery operations in Haiti after the earthquake. This is his first novel. He lives with his family in France and the United States.

Editorial Reviews

With the suddenness of life itself, the 2010 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, leaving the lives and loves of its survivors in troubled disarray. This debut novel by Haitian-American journalist Dimitry Elias Léger evokes the aftermath of the event by describing both its ensuing chaos and the determination of those who felt there was no alternative to just getting through. (P.S. Gary Shteyngart described this fiction as "so powerful as to be mesmerizing.")

…[an] energetic and unusual novel…Léger, born in Haiti and educated in America, deftly sketches his country's postcolonial struggles as well as its faith, resilience and promise. Although his characters remain a little untangible, his Haiti-in-crisis, richly seen and unforgettable, is all too real.

The New York Times Book Review - Regina Marler

11/17/2014
In the moments just before the biblically awful Haitian earthquake of 2010 hits Port-au-Prince, the beautiful Natasha Robert is walking across the tarmac, pulled by her new husband, who happens to also be the Haitian president , toward a waiting plane. Though she has been anticipating escape her whole life and is indeed about to be ferried off to a luxurious life in Italy, Natasha is suddenly hesitant, apprehensive about leaving behind her true love, Alain, whom she’s left locked in her closet at the National Palace. For all the destruction the imminent earthquake will cause, it will also save Natasha, though in unexpected and mysterious ways. This debut novel explores how Natasha comes to grips with what has unfolded both in her country and in her heart. While the setup is promising and the context rich for emotional mining, the novel often feels slow and even repetitive, not for the mourning and reflection such horror would seem to force, but for the cyclical tendencies of the narrative. Although Alain, the president , and Natasha wander in the aftermath of the quake, their separate emotions seem restated rather than deepened, but the book still shows undeniable strength and a powerful message about creating something new out of such devastation. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

[Léger ]deftly sketches his country’s postcolonial struggles as well as its faith, resilience and promise….his Haiti-in-crisis, richly seen and unforgettable, is all too real.

New York Times Book Review

Léger’s use of imagery when describing the aftermath of the earthquake is remarkable and unparalleled; it offers a refreshing perspective. God Loves Haiti is a detailed and gripping account of the tragic events that occurred, infused with a story of romance, courage and change.

AfroPunk

So powerful as to be mesmerizing. I don’t think I’ve seen the Haitian earthquake of 2010 represented with such compassion and insight. One of those books that leave you wishing the author could produce a tome every month.

Gary Shteyngart

A fully mature novel in scope and perspective, as rich in ideas as in humanity. Funny, street-smart, and keenly observed, God Loves Haiti establishes Léger as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.

Edwidge Danticat

The Port-au-Prince earthquake of 2010 may seem like an odd setting for a romantic comedy, but then Haiti really is an amazing place! Dimitry Elias Léger has brought it off, with a smile, a tear, and a peppery dash of satire as a lagniappe.

Madison Smartt Bell

A luminous debut . . . Léger writes beautifully and with an immense humanity. . . . He renders [Haiti] in all of its stupendous beautiful tortured complexity. A stand-out novel.

Junot Diaz

A work of fiction that combines breathless narrative movement with memorable writing and unabashed Big Ideas. [An] impressive debut novel.

Andrea Lee

The heat, the horror, the taste of ashes: Reading this vivid debut novel about the Port-au-Prince earthquake of 2010-and the risky love triangle that survives it-is jolting and exhilarating.

More magazine

With empathy and wit, Léger captures the intricacies of a country that is at once beautiful and tortured….There is no doubt that God Loves Haiti will leave readers wanting more from this talented author.

M&V Magazine

11/01/2014
This debut novel (think Love in the Time of Cholera) follows three loves across Port-au-Prince.

Library Journal

★ 2015-01-08
Can an unimaginable catastrophe bring forth a triumph of the imagination? It can and, in the case of Haiti's 2010 earthquake, has with this bright, brilliant novel. Journalist Léger's first novel is, all at once, a bittersweet romantic comedy of errors, a vivid evocation of a calamity's aftereffects and a valentine to his home nation of Haiti. The calamity in question is the 2010 earthquake that ravaged the island in a manner of seconds. In the midst of the devastation, three intersecting lives arrive at a reckoning: the country's president, who has inherited a terrible legacy from decades of tyranny and corruption; his wife, Natasha Robert, a beautiful artist who, just before the quake struck, was in a sexual clinch in the presidential palace with her former lover Alain Destinè, the dreamer/entrepreneur she dumped for the chief executive. For a while after the quake, none of the three sides of this romantic triangle is certain the others have survived, yet they carry on with their lives on and off the island. The president is shown heading north to the U.N. in search of support, moral and otherwise. He finds it from his American counterpart in a hilarious exchange that, even if it didn't happen, should have. Alain, meanwhile, finds himself dragging a broken foot through the debris while finding other survivors and dodging thugs ordered by the president to kill him for coveting his wife. (He's saved from a beating by an American movie star who's helping with the recovery.) As for Natasha, she wanders the battered landscape of bodies and rubble in a daze, her personal regrets overpowered by the grace and perseverance she finds in her people, whose country's history was fraught with despair, death and injustice even before it was changed forever by what Haitians call the "goudou-goudou" (a euphemism approximating the sounds made by the earthquake). With shimmering, lyrical prose, Léger conjures an incisive vision of Haiti's complex heritage, tortured soul and dauntless spirit.

Kirkus Reviews