In Limbo

Thélyson Orélien’s debut novel opens with a devastating portrait of gang warfare: “Carrefour-Feuilles had already stopped being a neighbourhood. It was a giant ashtray, a cemetery without tombs, an absurd theatre where roles changed with each burst of gunfire.” Jonas Dorléon, a schoolteacher living in Port-au-Prince’s impoverished outskirts, is drinking his morning coffee when the shooting begins. A stray bullet hits a gas tank, starting a fire that consumes his one-room home. When he finally decides to run, he comes across a former student, now with a gun on his knees, who lets him pass. “In this messed-up country, you still have enough heart not to kill your history teacher,” he thinks. Jonas keeps fleeing for the next 200 pages, leaving Haiti for the Dominican Republic, then reaching Brazil, and finally taking the overland route to Quebec through Roxham Road.

C’était ça ou mourir (It was that or die) was a smash hit even before it arrived on bookshelves...