In 1937, Rafael Trujillo, President of the Dominican Republic, decided to rid his country of the many Haitians who worked in the cane fields. The characters here are fiction but the story is not. Amabell Desirt is a young Haitian orphaned at age eight and rescued by a Dominican family where she later becomes a maid. She is in love with a cane worker on a nearby farm. When she fears that the army has taken him, she gathers her few belongings and begins the long trek over the mountains in hopes of meeting him across the Dominican/Haitian border. What follows is a story of heartbreak, despair and terror. It is also a story of love, barbarity, dignity, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.

"Ms. Danticat has successfully balanced what could have simply been a tale of woe with the redeeming power of bearing witness...eye-opening and delicately written." (New York Times Book Review)

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