Village Weavers - Paperback

by Myriam J. a. Chancy (Author)

A TIME Best Book of April

Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

"Chancy is one of our most brilliant writers and storytellers."--Edwidge Danticat

"Myriam J. A. Chancy is a masterful writer."--José Olivarez

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.

Author Biography

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.