Maryse Condé brings together both a narrative that is enthralling -- a sort of modern Silas Marner -- and commentary on global migration. Where this novel is most compelling is in the multiple perspectives that the narrative inhabits, digging into what it means to be in Haiti -- a country where the living and the dead comingle -- as people who straddle international boundaries. Babakar is the main character. Malian, he comes to Haiti by way of Guadeloupe, where, in the process of delivering a stranger's baby, the mother dies. Babakar then decides to go to Haiti to find the baby's family. In the process, however, Condé gives space for other characters to share their stories and how they came to Babakar's orbit. In almost interlocking chapters, characters deliver autobiographies that feel decidedly honest in tone and scope (filled with intricate minutia but never overstuffed). The book also investigates how friendships and global solidarity is formed in a broadly post-colonial context, linking Palestinian freedom to a Pan-African movement to an Afro-Caribbean struggle with intelligently realized geodiversity.

Maryse Condé is, perhaps, one of the most astute anti-colonial storytellers, and her world of fiction is one that is profound to inhabit.