It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haiti border. Amabelle, orphaned at
the age of 8 when her parents drowned, is maid to the young wife of an army
colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant, even delivering
the senora's babies in an emergency and supporting her in her grief at one
infant's death. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They
are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors
that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are
always rumors, jealousies, fears.
Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his
face, his callused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their
future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins.
The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance,
and the only triumph possible for the persecuted and the innocent: to endure.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT was nominated for the National Book
Award in 1995 for her story collection Krik? Krak! Her first novel, Breath,
Eyes, Memory, was published to acclaim when she was twenty-five. She has received a
grant from the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Foundation and was selected
as one of twenty "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta in 1996.
Her most recent novel is The Dew Breaker.
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