Lisette, a Saint-Domingue-born Creole slave and daughter of an African-born "bossale," has inherited not only the condition of slavery but the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage as well. The stories told to her by her grandmother and godmother, including the horrific voyage aboard the infamous slave ship "Rosali"e, have become part of her own story, the one she tells in this haunting novel by the acclaimed Haitian writer Evelyne Trouillot.

Inspired by the colonial tale of an African midwife who kept a cord of some seventy knots, each one marking a child she had killed at birth, the novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti. The year is 1750, and a rash of poisonings is sowing fear among the plantation masters, already unsettled by the unrest caused by Makandal, the legendary Maroon leader. Through this tumultuous time, Lisette struggles to maintain her dignity and to imagine a future for her unborn child. In telling Lisette's story, Trouillot gives the revolution that will soon rock the island a human face and at long last sheds light on the invisible women and men of Haitian history.

The original French edition of "Rosalie l'infame" received the "Prix Soroptimist de la romanciere francophone," honoring a novel written by a woman from a French-speaking country which showcases the cultural and literary diversity of the French-speaking world.

How do you live in Algeria when you grow up speaking French, with a French mother? How do you live in France when you've spent your childhood in Algeria with an Algerian father? "Tomboy" is the story of a girl whose father calls her Brio, whose alter ego is Amine, and whose mother is a blue-eyed blond. But who is she? Born five years after Algerian independence in 1967, she navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity living in a world that doesn't seem to recognize her. In this semiautobiographical novel, the young French Algerian author Nina Bouraoui introduces us to a girl who feels that Algeria is the country of men. Her childhood years spent in Algeria lead her to explore the borderland between genders as she tries to find her balance between nations, races, and identities. With prose modeling the rhythm of the seasons and the sea, "Tomboy" enters the innermost reality of a life lived on the edge of several cultures.