Primitive People: A Novel

Fleeing the terrors of her home, a Haitian woman finds that life in America is filled with its own hardships

Simone has gotten used to living in fear. After years of dictatorship, Haiti has sunk into chaos, and death is ever present. But it isn’t the corpse she finds on her doorstep that convinces Simone to flee the island of her birth—it’s the night she sees her lover with his arm draped around the shoulder of another. Death is one thing, but she cannot tolerate heartbreak.

The assistant to the United States’ cultural attaché, Simone is clever enough to get herself a green card. But when she gets to New York, she finds that her smarts cannot guarantee her a job. Accepting a position as a “caregiver” in a wealthy community upstate, Simone finds herself little more than a glorified nanny to a pair of astonishingly spoiled children. But there is a dark side to her humble new life among the WASPs, and this émigré will find that the rich can be more barbaric than she ever knew.