In Darkness by Nick Lake
Bloomsbury $29.99
The world watched in horror as, in 2010, Haiti's main city Port au Prince collapsed under a shocking earthquake, its poorly constructed buildings crashing down and killing around a quarter of a million people. Since then, we've had our own earthquake and while it's a dangerous and foolish game to compare tragedies, Haiti's extreme poverty and troubled history certainly added a devastating dimension to the natural disaster.
What do we know of Haiti? For most of us the answer is probably not much - apart from the fact that it's one of the world's poorest countries. So, reading a novel set there is particularly satisfying, expanding our understanding beyond our own quotidian horizons and, yes, making our own daily concerns seem mostly paltry by comparison.
The story works in two distinct yet related time frames, 200 years apart. In the now, the earthquake has just happened. Fourteen-year-old Shorty, a gangster, is trapped inside the ruins of the hospital where he'd been treated for a gunshot wound. Pinned there in the darkness, starving and dehydrated, he revisits his brief life.
He's a child of Port au Prince's notorious slum Site Soley, often described, the author's note tells us, as the most dangerous place on earth. It's a place where some of the most unbelievable details are the truest: yes, desperate people really do eat pies made of mud, and babies really are left on piles of trash to die.
