Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
What Storm, What Thunder
American Book Award Winner
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year
“Stunning.” —Margaret Atwood
At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. 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.
Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
1138735015
What Storm, What Thunder
American Book Award Winner
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year
“Stunning.” —Margaret Atwood
At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. 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.
Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year
“Stunning.” —Margaret Atwood
At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. 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.
Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (Tin House), a Time Best Book of April 2024 and winner of the 2025 Fiction OCM Bocas Award in Caribbean Literature. Her work has received multiple awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a "Best Book of 2021," by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, the Globe & Mail, shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award & Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize & the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels, The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
