Mouths Don't Speak
Honorable Mention in the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Long List!
"A captivating portrait of a woman plagued with worry about family and homeland, this beautifully written novel recalls Toni Morrison's Paradise."
--Library Journal
"Powerful . . . As Ulysse explores grief, she moves beyond her protagonist to consider the murky motivations and emotions of other characters. This is a harrowing, thoughtful dive into the aftermath of national and personal tragedies filtered through diasporic life."
--Publishers Weekly
"Ulysse gives readers a riveting story of a woman who is trying to make sense of a homescape that, if not wholly disappeared, is irrevocably altered."
--BuzzFeed
"A beautiful reminder that the obstacles we face are not who we are; rather, they make us who we are."
--Tulsa Book Review
No one was prepared for the massive earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, taking over a quarter-million lives, and leaving millions of others homeless. Three thousand miles away, Jacqueline Florestant mourns the presumed death of her parents, while her husband, a former US Marine and combat veteran, cares for their three-year-old daughter as he fights his own battles with acute PTSD.
Horrified and guilt-ridden, Jacqueline returns to Haiti in search of the proverbial "closure." Unfortunately, the Haiti she left as a child twenty-five years earlier has disappeared. Her quest turns into a tornado of deception, desperation, and more death. So Jacqueline holds tightly to her daughter--the only one who must not die.
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Katia D. Ulysse is a fiction writer, born in Haiti. Her short stories, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including: The Caribbean Writer, Smartish Pace, Phoebe, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Mozayik, The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, and Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat. She has taught in Baltimore public schools for thirteen years, and served as Goucher College's Spring 2017 Kratz Writer in Residence. Drifting, a collection of short stories, drew high praise from literary critics. She is currently at work on another short story collection. Mouths Don't Speak is her latest novel.
A deftly scripted and compelling read from first page to last, Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse is one of those rare and inherently riveting novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf.-- "Midwest Book Review"
A beautiful exploration of one woman's quest to salvage a life that's been destroyed by an unforeseeable natural disaster.-- "Bitch, Included in BitchReads: 25 Fiction Books You Must Read in 2018"
Haitian-American author Katia D. Ulysse's Mouths Don't Speak is the powerful story of home and identity centered on a woman who returns to Haiti after a 25-year absence when an earthquake kills her parents.-- "The Root"
In this dark and stirring domestic novel about family, loss, and mental health . . . Ulysse expertly captures the grief of expats witnessing a tragedy from afar, while also critiquing the globetrotting 24/7 news cycle that feeds off disaster porn.-- "Atticus Review"
