Reading Order
The Dew Breaker Reading Order
Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004) is a standalone novel comprising nine linked stories organized around the figure of a Haitian 'dew breaker' — a torturer who worked for the Duvalier regime's secret police, the Tonton Macoute — who has escaped to Brooklyn and built a new life, and whose daughter discovers the truth about who her father is. A meditation on violence, memory, and what it means to live alongside the perpetrators of atrocity.
Where to start
The Dew Breaker
Complete The Dew Breaker Book List
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The Dew Breaker
Edwidge Danticat·2004·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Breath, Eyes, Memory
OptionalEdwidge Danticat·1994·Sophie Caco, a young Haitian woman who goes from Haiti to New York to join her mother and discovers the traumatic secret her mother carries — Danticat's debut novel; the most directly comparable to The Dew Breaker in its portrait of Haitian immigrant life in Brooklyn and its engagement with intergenerational trauma. - Buy
Brother I'm Dying
OptionalEdwidge Danticat·2007·Danticat's memoir about the deaths of her father and her uncle — her uncle died in US immigration detention — and the two men who shaped her life; a companion to The Dew Breaker in its engagement with the violence that the Haitian state and the American immigration system do to ordinary people.
The Dew Breaker — Frequently Asked Questions
What is a dew breaker?
A 'dew breaker' is a Haitian Creole term for a torturer who arrests people in the early morning, before the dew has dried — at the moment when the night's silence has not yet been broken by the day's activity, when a neighborhood is still asleep and the arrest can happen without witnesses. The term belongs specifically to the culture of the Tonton Macoute, the secret police and paramilitary force created by François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and continued under his son Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, which used torture, murder, and disappearance as instruments of political control in Haiti from 1959 to 1986. Danticat's title announces the novel's engagement with this specific history while also giving the torturer a Creole identity that is inseparable from the community he terrorized: the dew breaker is not simply a monster but a man who came from the same society as his victims and whose violence was enabled by a political system that the international community, including the United States, largely supported.
How does The Dew Breaker structure its narrative?
The Dew Breaker is structured as a novel-in-stories — nine linked narratives that circle around the figure of the dew breaker without giving him continuous first-person narration. The opening story establishes the central situation: a Haitian sculptor named Ka is traveling with her father to deliver a statue she has made of him, and during the journey she discovers that the statue will not be delivered because of something her father tells her about his past. Subsequent stories move backward and forward in time, following different characters whose lives intersect with the dew breaker's — some of them his victims, some of them members of the Brooklyn Haitian community who know nothing about who he was. The novel's final story returns to Haiti and to the dew breaker's own experience, providing a partial but not complete account of how he became what he was. This structure enacts the novel's argument about how atrocity is remembered and passed on: no single perspective can account for the full meaning of the violence, and the novel refuses to organize that violence into a single moral narrative.
Who is Edwidge Danticat, and why does she matter?
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) is a Haitian-American writer who is one of the most important voices in contemporary Caribbean literature and one of the few Haitian writers with a substantial English-language readership. Born in Port-au-Prince, she was raised largely by her aunt and uncle in Haiti while her parents built a life in New York; she joined them at the age of twelve and was educated in Brooklyn schools and subsequently at Barnard College and Brown University. Her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) — published when she was twenty-five and based on her own experience of Haitian immigrant life in New York — was chosen for Oprah's Book Club and brought her a large popular readership. Her subsequent work — the story collection Krik? Krak! (1995), the novel The Farming of Bones (1998), and The Dew Breaker (2004) — established her as a serious literary voice engaged with the history of Haiti and the experience of the Haitian diaspora. Brother I'm Dying (2007), a memoir about her father and uncle, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work is notable for its engagement with the specific violence of Haitian political history, its portrait of Haitian immigrant community life in Brooklyn, and its refusal to simplify either the perpetrators or the victims of political violence.
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