In A Knife in the Sky, a journalist's decision to talk and a student's desire to know puts them in the crosshairs of a murderous dictatorship. As the novel opens, Mika is dangerously engaged in the pursuit of truth during Haiti's first Duvalier regime. Nearly thirty years later, her granddaughter Junon witnesses the repressive dynasty's unravelling. Brutal, terrifying, and hopeful, A Knife in the Sky is an homage to those who have survived tyranny.

Originally published by les éditions du remue-ménage in 2015 as Femmes au temps des carnassiers, this book, like most of the author's oeuvre, is preoccupied with colonial imposition. Marie-Célie Agnant writes on the ruthlessness of a dictatorship, on humanity, and locates the strength and power of resistance in women.

A poet, short story writer, young adult fiction writer, storyteller, and novelist, Marie-Célie Agnant was born in Haiti and has lived in Québec since 1970. Many of her books evoke the hardships endured by women in the West Indies and the difficulty of legitimizing this part of history even today. Her work has been published in Québec, France, and Haiti, and translated into several languages. Her novel Le dot de Sara (Remue-Ménage, 1995) was a finalist for the Desjardins prize, her collection of short stories Le silence comme le sang (Remue-Ménage, 1997) was a finalist for the Governor General’s prize for fiction, and she has won the Prix Gros Sel for her children’s book La légende du poisson amoureux (Mémoire d’encrier, 2003), the prose creation prize awarded by the SODEP for “Sofialorène, si loin de la délivrance,” and the prestigious Prix Alain-Grandbois for her third collection of poems Femmes des terres brûlées (Éditions de la Pleine Lune, 2016).

Marie-Célie Agnant's profile page

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator whose work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications including The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, Grain, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Fire. Her collection What if red ran out (Goose Lane Editions, 2008) was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the 2009 Gerald Lampert award for best first book.Her book translations include Louis Patrick Leroux’s play False Starts: A Subterfuge of Excellent Wit (with Alexandre St-Laurent; Talonbooks, 2016), Martine Delvaux’s White Out (LLP, 2018), Jeanne Painchaud’s ABCMTL (ruelle, 2019), Stéphane Martelly’s Little Girl Gazelle (ruelle, 2020), Ioana Georgescu’s Daughterof Here (LLP, 2020), and Marie-Claire Blais’s Songs for Angel (House of Anansi, 2021). Her translations of David Clerson’s first novel, Brothers (QC Fiction, 2016), and of Alina Dumitrescu’s A Cemetery for Bees (LLP, 2021) were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for translation. www.katiagrubisic.com

Katia Grubisic's profile page

"The work is shaped through a rich, crafted language that creates an acute awareness of what duvalierism was. This considerable effort is not a catharsis, nor an anamnesis; rather, it is the heart-rending testimony of the suffering, the inner struggles and the stand against Duvalierism of a woman caught in the midst of a regime that redefined the heights of horror."
-Alain Saint-Victor, Potomitan

"Marie-Celie Agnant's work is noble: she names and narrates terrible emotions and chaos, yet always in a sensitive and poetic way. The fate of the women in her books is not sealed by the torment of their daily lives, but in the humanity of each one. Through these portraits of women-courageous women, women who are full of hope, even without underestimating the weight on their shoulders-Agnant shows us the pain they carry from one generation to the next."
-Le Fil Rouge

"Breathless: that was the state in which I found myself in after reading Marie-Célie Agnant's work. This was the first time that I was speechless after reading a book. I am without words: the words to describe it, without the words to recount the story, the words to articulate what matters most. The essence of the book cannot be resolved in a sentence or summary. After finishing the novel, only the emotions remain, some more intense than others. Rage, powerlessness, anger, love, and friendship unfold, and coalesce into love, anger, and madness. In order to create this emotional amalgam, you have to have lived it, felt what the characters feel, you have to have experienced this tragedy-and above all, come out of it more alive, and stronger...Marie-Célie Agnant isn't just telling a story. She has become the interpreter of a voice, the living witness of a time, an era. Marie-Célie Agnant awakens memory and conscience."
-Rachel Vorbe, Le Nouvelliste