What Storm, What Thunder | A conversation with Myriam J. A. Chancy & Marsha Massiah-Aaron

Buy the book here!

Buy the audiobook here!

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Ph.D. is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of What Storm, What Thunder, a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake (HarperCollins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), which was named a "Best Book of 2021," by NPR, Kirkus, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, Amazon Books & Canada's Globe & Mail. WS, WT was shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize & the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, for Best Fiction 2010; The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti, shortlisted in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize, 2004. Her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature, Guernica and Room Magazine.

ABOUT OUR CONVERSATION PARTNER

Marsha Massiah-Aaron was born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago, the islands to which she credits the shaping of her creative consciousness, interests and passion for cultural promotion and preservation. She is an instructional designer, project manager, creative content and concept producer and visionary. She received her undergraduate degree in Caribbean history with honours from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and holds a post-graduate diploma in project management from New York University. She is an ardent lover of carnival, Caribbean culture, history, literature, the arts and fitness. She is passionate about the dissemination of knowledge, which underpins all her creative endeavours.  Marsha currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she is promoting the movement to lay claim to the rightful ownership of Caribbean literature, encouraging hidden writers of Caribbean descent tell their own stories and inducting Generation Z into the magic, power and pride of the storytelling tradition of their ancestors.