The Best Books on Haiti

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat's novel moves back and forth between 1960s Haiti and present-day New York as it tells the story of a Dew Breaker, a name given to torturers during the repressive regime of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who takes victims away "before dawn, as the dew is settling on the leaves".

Nine chapters, each of which could be a standalone short story, provide fragments of the Dew Breaker's life as seen through the eyes of his family and his victims. These fractured vignettes draw the reader into a larger, more complex tale.

The Dew Breaker is now hiding from his bloody past, working as a barber in Brooklyn. But he daily faces the threat of being recognized by one of his victims and exposed for what he once was.

In the novel's final chapter, the disparate stories satisfyingly come together as we meet the Dew Breaker preparing for his final killing before leaving Haiti.

This clever and powerful novel shows how hunter and prey – who are seeking new lives in the US – find their present and future circumscribed by a brutal past.

Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the US when she was 12. In the acknowledgements, she writes: "For my father, who, thank goodness, is not in this book."

The Comedians by Graham Greene

Greene's classic tragicomedy is set in Haiti under Duvalier and his sinister secret police, the Tontons Macoute.

Three men meet on a boat to Port-au-Prince: the world-weary Brown, the narrator who owns a hotel in the capital; the idealistic but naive Smith, a former US presidential candidate; and Jones, a charming conman with a bogus résumé. These flawed human beings are the comedians of the title, whose fates become intertwined amid Haiti's corruption and violence.

Brown's life becomes increasingly complicated and fraught with danger after the suicide of a government minister in his hotel's swimming pool, his rekindling of an affair with an ambassador's wife and his getting caught up in Jones's foolhardy escapades.

Though Papa Doc never appears in the novel, he casts a long shadow over events. And in a dig at US cold-war policy, we are reminded that the dictator is a "bulwark against communism", sustained by aid from Washington.

Greene vividly evokes the fear and loathing in Haiti, and his elegantly written black comedy-cum-political thriller allows a light of hope to flicker in the darkness.

After the novel's publication in 1966, a furious Papa Doc banned Greene and his book. The British author died in 1991.

Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz

Wilentz's Letter from Haiti (the book's subtitle) is actually a warts and all love letter to the country.

After Haiti's devastating earthquake in 2010, the author is drawn back to the country she has written about for many years. On arrival, she finds humanitarian aid groups "fighting for a piece of Haitian action", leading her to question their motives – and her own.

Wilentz embarks on a vigorous, intensely personal quest to better understand the country and its people, unafraid to challenge received wisdom and tell inconvenient truths. Along the way, she reveals Haiti's beauty and brutality through personal stories, politics, culture and its tortured history. Home to "the first and last successful slave revolution in history", Haiti became the world's first black-led republic. But it was made to pay a crippling price for its audacity by France – the colonial master – and the US, from which it has never recovered.

She argues that Haiti and its people – Fred Voodoo is the old, politically incorrect term for the man on the street – need to be understood on their own terms, rather than through western misconceptions and prejudices. Her intimate knowledge and her acerbic and fluid prose make Wilentz the perfect guide through Haiti's "post-apocalyptic dystopia".

Wilentz is an American journalist who has closely followed Haiti's fortunes since the fall of the Duvalier regime in the 1980s.