From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who she loved, she and her family continued to fear for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorated.

In 2004, they entered into a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Brother I'm Dying is an astonishing true-life epic, told on an intimate scale by one of our finest writers.

“A powerful memoir that will be etched on our hearts forever. [Danticat] offers insight into a rough time in Haiti when the government is at its worst and people are being killed in the streets.  We connect to her and her family so closely we begin to feel their pain and want to extend our deepest sympathies.  Though most of these events happened years ago, she captures them as if she has remained in the moment, giving us the most vivid and intricate details to fill our imaginations.  When we read, we become her and go through her life, only to learn that we can conquer even the largest of obstacles.”

            –Paula Just, The Chattanooga Pulse

“Remarkable . . . moving . . . A heroic family memoir artfully crafted. . . . Brother, I’m Dying is a portrait of the strength and courage of the Danticat family, whose love for each other allows them to survive and triumph in spite of the immeasurable cruelty unleashed in the political upheavals in Haiti and the sometimes callous response of the Western powers. . . . Brother, I’m Dying already has an impact on the treatment of Haitian immigrants in U.S. detention centers.  An elderly man was released recently from Krome [Detention Center] because of [Danticat’s] published newspaper essays about the treatment of her Uncle Joseph.  Danticat is always ahead of time, bearing the pain that is sometimes too unbearable to imagine, but always with a quiet dignity and irrepressible joy in the possibilities for the future.” 

Elizabeth Nunez, Black Issues Book Review (cover)

 “[Brother, I’m Dying] vividly captures how immigration shaped the Haitian-born [Danticat]’s life and writing. . . . She is . . . measured on the page–a remarkable feat given her subject matter.”

            –Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg News

“Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I'm Dying will break your heart but put it back together through the healing magic of her clear, compassionate, beautiful writing. Danticat draws us into her family, to share its joys and also its journey to the heart of darkness. But she also shows us the way back: we become brothers and sisters in an even larger family, the human family, bonded together by the power of her storytelling.  This is what the best writing can do.  And why we need storytellers like her more than ever.”

Julia Alvarez

From the Hardcover edition.

“[Danticat’s] ability to render large complex stories in compact format is powerfully evident in her new memoir, Brother, I’m Dying . . . She comes head-on at the painful tale she has to tell, with results that are both eloquent and devastating. . . . Danticat, drawing on her own memories, family reminisces and U.S. government documentation, makes vivid every stage of [her] fractured family history.  In her hands, the distance between experience as it’s lived and experience as it’s rendered on the page all but disappears.  A sentence as spare and unadorned as ‘Wrong was now the norm,’ for instance, has a power beyond anything you might expect, simply because of its careful placement in Danticat’s flow of recollection.  This is an author who hits her targets with minimum fuss.  Danticat is also an author with a political point to make. . . . The story of [her Uncle] Joseph’s death at the hands of a fumbling, unsympathetic bureaucracy is harrowing. . . . If you have any interest in why would-be immigrants risk so much to reach this country, you will have to read Danticat.  And if you already have an interest in Danticat, you will want to read this book.”

            –Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

“Danticat’s beautiful prose reads as though you’re sitting at her knee, hearing a favorite story told again.  Warm and inviting, she makes Haiti seem like a second home to the reader.  That’s not to say Danticat waxes sentimental.  Full of controlled anger and grief, the author strips her family’s history bare.”

            –Beth Dugan, Time Out Chicago

“Instead of writing an airless cliché about death-birth cycles, Ms. Danticat enlivens her father and uncle by gracefully detailing their sagacious attitudes about the nature of parenthood and parental sacrifices, about political commitment and personal responsibility, and about the benefits of fraternity and family.  Geographically and psychologically situated between them, Ms. Danticat memorializ[es] the lives and deaths of her two fathers. . . . a beautiful and devastating testament to their lives.”

            –Walton Muyumba, The Dallas Morning News

“Danticat is a gifted novelist, and she has a remarkable story to tell that spans three generations.  Brother, I’m Dying gracefully moves in and out of time, mixing past and present experiences.  This is a supple, elegant book that ends with both joy and heartbreak.”

           

Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

“Graceful  . . .  Danticat’s most intimate tale yet, of brotherhood and family amid Haiti’s, and the United States’, chaotic circumstances. . . . It’s as if Danticat offers as a gift the joys that lie beneath what we so easily take as utter turmoil; the sweets her uncle brought her as a child that she savored only after handing them right back for him to savor, the typewriter her distant but astute father gave her at 14, her own child who is born while she’s in mourning.  While sorrow and the deep roots of pain and injustice sew up your heart through its pages, Brother, I'm Dying is, in the end, a story of lives hard fought, and ones certainly never taken for granted.”

            –Elizabeth Gettelman, Mother Jones

“Danticat excels in description that makes Haiti come alive . . . Historical events and political figures seep through her book, carrying implicit questions of both Haitian and American actions. . . . Danticat concentrates on the struggles of her family in celebration and as memorial, but her memoir also serves as a ‘purposeful rattle.’  It calls out for attention and solution.”

            –Susan Grimm, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Taut, autobiographical and admirably reported, Brother, I'm Dying reminds us of truth's elemental force when unsentimentally and faithfully delivered. . . . If Brother, I'm Dying, does not break your heart, you don’t have one.  It is not often that, a day after closing a book, one writes a review interrupted by tears, by lumps in the throat. Such are the aftershocks of the story Danticat tells."

Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"The inimitable Edwidge Danticat has a new book out, a poignant memoir of her family's own diaspora between Haiti and the United States. . . . at once an account of one family’s generations and a reflection on leaving loved ones behind—a reckoning of the price that is paid by staying, and by leaving."

—BOMB Magazine

"A fascinating memoir that traces the author's family history against the rich, turbulent backdrop of Haiti."

—Chicago Tribune

"This memoir is [Danticat's] most powerful work to date, not just because it is all true, but because it all comes down to an 81-year-old clergyman, arriving in the Greatest Nation on Earth with his passport and tourist visa to see his dying brother, who lost his identity, his dignity and his life because he filled out a form incorrectly." —Kate Callen, San Diego Union-Tribune

"Powerful . . . Danticat's novels have won acclaim for bringing Haiti's rich, tortured history to light; she infuses this tender memoir, a portrait of the two men she called father, with details of the oppression, poverty and violence that forced them, and thousands of others, from their island.  Danticat keeps her outrage below boil so her reportage speaks for itself.  The result is a testament to family bonds so strong they can survive separation, distance, even death. * * * * (Four Stars)" —Sue Corbett, People 

"As with her earlier, award-winning works . . . Elegiac . . . For all the palpable stories throughout this memoir, it is also a story about a family's love, and the profound bond among brothers, parents, and children. Danticat is such an elegant writer, her prose so free of showy flourishes, that her words can seem deceptively simple. She has the confidence to allow the story to tell itself, and find its own place. Emotional, but never mawkish, Brother, I'm Dying is a stellar achievement from a writer whose stunning talents continue to soar and amaze." —Renée Graham, Boston Sunday Globe

"Deeply affecting . . . Danticat brings the lyric language and emotional clarity of her remarkable novel The Dew Breaker to bear on the story of her own family, a story which, like so much of her fiction, embodies the painful legacy of Haiti's violent history, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect in the lives of that country’s citizens and exiles. Ms. Danticat not only creates an indelible portrait of her two fathers, her dad and her uncle, but in telling their stories, she gives the reader an intimate sense of the personal consequences of the Haitian diaspora: its impact on parents and children, brothers and sisters, those who stay and those who leave to begin a new life abroad. She has written a fierce, haunting book about exile and loss and family love, and how that love can survive distance and separation, loss and abandonment and somehow endure, undented and robust. . . . Moving." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Memoir is a witness which swears to tell the truth. Memoir is the magic of love and remembrance. Magic is Edwidge Danticat who taps on her keyboard to the rhythm of angels.”

Nikki Giovanni

From the award-winning author of "The Dew Breaker" comes her first work of nonfiction: a deeply affecting story of home and family, of two men's lives and deaths, and of a daughter's great love for them both.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

Edwidge Danticat is available for lectures and readings. For information regarding her availability, please visit www.knopfspeakersbureau.com or call 212-572-2013.