Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy
CBC Books | Posted: March 27, 2024 8:00 PM | Last Updated: July 4
An extraordinary story of two girls — forever joined by country, secrets and an unbreakable bond
From award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy comes an extraordinary and enduring story of two families — forever joined by country, and by long-held secrets — and two girls with a bond that refuses to be broken.
In 1940s' Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship — until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier's rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family.
Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and — perhaps — forgive the past.
Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls — connected their entire lives — who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other's hearts. (From Tin House)
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism. Her novel The Loneliness of Angels won the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize in Carribbean Literature for fiction. Chancy was raised in Haiti and Canada and now resides in the U.S. Her previous book, What Storm, What Thunder, was longlisted for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.