Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings.In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Korosòl Resto-Bar, when the broken and deep voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what has happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this still unpunished crime as well.Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince: Ezekiel, the poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Nerline, women's rights activist; Waner, diligent...

In Port au Prince, Haiti, the police roam the streets and no one is safe. Fignolé, a musician and political radical, is missing. His sisters Joyeuse and Angelique search for their young brother amid the colorful bustle, urban deprivation, and political tension of the city; when they eventually locate him, they will have found more about themselves than they wanted to know. This story explores one day and three lives in a city where love is hard to find, life is cheap, and death is all too familiar. It is the tense, passionate, and vividly told story of small victories of hope in the face of a seemingly impossible fight against a monolithic regime.

The award-winning saga of a peasant family living in a small Haitian village, told through four generations of voices, recounting through stories of tradition and superstition, voodoo and the new gods, romance and violence, the lives of the women who struggled to hold the family together in an ever-shifting landscape of political turmoil and economic suffering.