VILLAGE WEAVERS by Myriam J.A. Chancy - Spotlight

 

VILLAGE WEAVERS has been chosen A TIME Best Book of April

From award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy comes an extraordinary and enduring story of two families. VILLAGEWEAVERS (TinHouseBooks) tells the story of two girls with long-held secrets and a bond that refuses to be broken.

In 1940s’ Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship―until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and―perhaps―forgive the past.

Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls―connected their entire lives―who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Ph. D. (U of Iowa 1994), is a Haitian Canadian/American writer/scholar born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised there and in the Canadian cities of Quebec City and Winnipeg.

Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder (Tin House 2021), was her North American debut novel, on the 2010 Haiti earthquake. WS, WT was awarded an ABA from the Before Columbus Foundation. She previously published 3 novels in the UK, Spirit of Haiti (Mango 2003; SUNY 2023), a finalist in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region, of the Commonwealth Prize 2004, The Scorpion's Claw (Peepal Tree Press 2005) and The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree Press 2010), winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize Best Fiction Caribbean Award.

She is also the author of 5 academic works, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers UP 1997) and Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (UP Texas 2023).

She is a fellow of the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.