Francesca Momplaisir

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.

A Novel

My Mother's House

The gripping story of generations of women--mothers and daughters of Haiti--and the devastating earthquake that endangers one family on the brink and wakes the ghosts of their shared past. Genevieve, a single mother, flies to Port-au-Prince in 2010 with her teenage son, Miles. The trip is meant to be an education for Miles--a chance to learn about his family's roots while coming to terms with his father's departure--but it's also an excuse for Genevieve to escape New York City, where her life is dominated by her failed marriage and the daily pressures of raising Black children in America. For Genevieve, the journey is also a homecoming of sorts: An opportunity to visit the island she remembers from childhood, reconnect with her abrasive cousin, Ateya, and tend to her young, dejected niece, Ti'Louse. But when the country is rocked by a massive earthquake--decimating the city and putting their lives at risk--Genevieve and Ateya are hurried down separate paths to preserve all they hold dearest: Ateya searching the plantain gardens for her daughter; Genevieve racing across the island to find medical care for her wounded son. Teetering on the fault line of history and one family's collapse, and written with dazzling prose and an unflinching eye, The Garden of Broken Things is an astonishing novel about restoration and disaster, motherhood and the bonds that carry through generations.

The Garden of Broken Things

"A literary thriller about the complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream--the triumphs and failure, mundane and aberrant--and the dangerous ripple effect one person's damages can have on the lives of others, all told by an unexpected narrator: a house that has held unspeakable horrors. When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City's South Ozone Park, he does so in the hopes of finding reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a rundown house in a community that is quickly changing from one filled with Italian mobsters to one attracting American Dream seekers like himself, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kaye, "my mother's house," and it becomes a center for their fellow immigrants to find peace, a good meal, and legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn't, Lucien soon falls back into his worst habits and impulses, with his new house acting as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What Lucien can't even begin to fathom is that La Kaye is always watching and passing judgement, and everything comes to a head on the day that it decides to stop the sins inside. But La Kaye doesn't even know the darkest secrets held within its walls, and only after it has set itself aflame does it hear the frightened whispers that will reveal Lucien's ultimate evil" -- Provided by publisher.

Francesca Momplaisir

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