Lyonel Trouillot
Haitian novelist, poet, and essayist known for works that explore Haitian history, politics, and daily life. His notable books include Street of Lost Footsteps (Rue des pas perdus), Bicentenaire, and La belle amour humaine, and he has also collaborated on screenplays with filmmaker Raoul Peck.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. Kannjawou
In a fractured Port-au-Prince neighborhood, a young narrator and his circle of friends—students, hustlers, and dreamers—observe the gated lives of elites and foreign aid workers while chronicling the daily grit, humor, and dangers of the streets. As UN troops and NGOs entrench a new order after political upheaval and disaster, they imagine staging a raucous communal celebration to reclaim public space and dignity, only to confront the hard limits imposed by inequality, fear, and history. Lyrical and acerbic, the story becomes a mosaic of voices and memories that questions what freedom means when a nation’s independence is commemorated but not lived.
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2. Memory At Bay
A young university student is assigned to interview an aging woman once entwined with a brutal dictatorship, and their uneasy dialogue unspools a web of silences, complicity, and trauma that lingers long after the regime’s fall. As guarded recollections give way to revelations about disappearances, betrayals, and the ordinary habits that enabled extraordinary violence, the narrative braids personal confession with collective history, probing the ethics of remembrance, the seductions of denial, and the fragile possibility of truth and accountability across generations.
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3. Street Of Lost Footsteps
A disenchanted, middle-class narrator wanders Port-au-Prince through a restless night on the eve of a mass demonstration, having been pressed to craft a speech meant to stir the crowds. As he moves between upscale salons and precarious neighborhoods, he encounters stories that lay bare the city’s entrenched inequalities and cyclical violence. Haunted by memories of a lost love and the failures of his own detachment, he wrestles with the power and peril of words and the impossibility of remaining neutral as history threatens to tip into bloodshed.
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