What Storm, What Thunder
SynopsisPlot
Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster―Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all.
Story
About this book
What Storm, What Thunder is set around the 2010 earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with a magnitude of 7.0. Myriam J. A. Chancy builds the novel through multiple voices, each belonging to a different person whose life is reshaped by the disaster. Among them are Richard, an expatriate water-bottling executive hiding the existence of a daughter; Anne, that daughter, who designs affordable housing for an international NGO; Leopold, a low-level drug trafficker; and Didier, a musician now driving a taxi in Boston.
Other voices include Sonia and her business partner Dieudonné, who believe a man following them is the vodou spirit of death. Sara, a mother in a displacement camp, is separated from her husband Olivier, an accountant who was forced to leave her behind. Their son Jonas connects and haunts both of their stories. Ma Lou, an elderly market vendor, serves as a kind of collective memory, holding the threads of all these lives together.
The novel moves between Haiti and the diaspora, between the hours before the earthquake and its long aftermath. Each narrator carries a distinct social position, from wealth to poverty, from those who stayed to those who left. The structure gives the event its scale not through statistics but through the accumulated weight of individual circumstances.
