Dèy — Edwidge Danticat

Magnolia hears gunfire in a Miami shopping mall, takes cover in a restaurant with strangers, gets home safely and tells nobody. That silence is the engine of Edwidge Danticat's first novel in ten years. The title is Haitian Kreyòl for mourning and the book does not stage it. What surviving the afternoon gives Magnolia is clear sight of everything she had been managing not to look at: her daughter Zoë, the child's father, a mother whose unraveling she can feel starting in her own hands, a father with a second family, and Haiti underneath all of it, where her parents and her sibling absorb losses on the ordinary weekday scale. Danticat has been publishing since Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994 and has never needed a plot to carry her. She needs a sentence. Hannah Jocelyn picked the book in The New Yorker on sentences alone; Publishers Weekly starred it; Kirkus reads it as a study of motherhood, nationhood and violence. Ten years is a long time to hold a novel back. Check on August 25 whether one afternoon in a Florida mall can hold a decade of Haiti inside it. Publishes August 25 by Knopf — 256 pages, $30, with a seven-hour audiobook read by Melinda Sewak.