Fiction of Place: A Reading

Carolina De Robertis, a writer of Uruguayan origins, grew up in England, Switzerland, and California. She is the author of two previous novels, Perla and The Invisible Mountain (a Best Book of 2009 according to the San Francisco Chronicle; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Booklist), and the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize and a 2012 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the anthology Immigrant Voices, and elsewhere. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages. In her latest novel, The Gods of Tango (Knopf), a woman’s passion for tango takes her to Buenos Aires where she must pose as a male musician.

Chantel Acevedo is Associate Professor of English in the MFA Program of the University of Miami. Her novels include Love and Ghost Letters, which won the Latino International Book Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book of the Year, Song of the Red Cloak, a historical novel for young adults, and A Falling Star. Her latest novel, set in Cuba in 1963, during one of the deadliest hurricanes in recorded history, is The Distant Marvels (Europa Editions), an epic adventure tale, a family saga, a love story, a stunning historical account of armed struggle against oppressors, and a long tender plea for forgiveness.

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. He worked as an adviser to the United Nations' disaster recovery operations in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. God Loves Haiti: A Novel (Amistad) is a formidable debut that pays homage to the resilient people of Haiti. At the heart of God Loves Haiti are the connected but divergent fates of its President, his wife, and her lover. 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? Told in the incandescent style of José Saramago and Roberto Bolaño, and reminiscent of Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, God Loves Haiti is an homage to a lost time and city, and the people who embody it.