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AUGUST 25, 2026

Dear Reader,

In December 2017, while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping at a South Florida mall, I heard a series of pops over a loudspeaker and was certain I was in the middle of a mass shooting. I remember shoppers fleeing, what could have easily become a stampede. It turned out to be a false alarm. Kids tampering with the mall’s sound system was one theory, but after my body recovered from its fight-or-flight instinct, it did not forget. Trying to make sense of how an ordinary day can suddenly tilt into a nightmare, I wrote about that moment in my 2024 essay collection We’re Alone, in an essay called “This Is My Body.”

 The woman at the center of Dèy, Magnolia Elie, survives a mass shooting but reacts differently. She tells no one. She doesn’t even fully tell herself. Instead, she begins quietly following the stories of those who didn’t survive, and a couple who did, all while she’s selling real estate in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Miami, raising a daughter on the edge of adolescence, navigating a recent separation from her partner, and caring from afar for her parents in Haiti, in whose neighborhood  mass killing and gun violence  have also become frighteningly common.

Dèy, a Haitian Kreyòl word for grief and mourning, is not only about heartache. It’s also about a family trying to stay meaningfully connected across distance while yearning to feel rooted in the different places they call home. It’s about devotion to loved ones, to community, and to the quiet rituals that keep us going through impossible times. One of the many questions running through this novel is how to protect the people we love when so much is beyond our control. There are no simple answers, in life or in novels, yet this question becomes increasingly urgent for Magnolia, as it has for many of us.

 Magnolia’s character grew out of that moment in the mall when I thought my life might end dramatically and violently. I have carried her with me for some time, and I can’t wait for you to meet Magnolia and her family and to experience her story. I can’t wait for you to read Dèy.

 Edwidge Danticat

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