Western PA Book Read

Dèy by Edwidge Danticat

Join us for the third annual Western PA Book Read as we read and discuss Dèy by Edwidge Danticat.

This year, we will distribute copies of Dèy to individuals and organizations beginning August 26, 2026. Between September 2026 and February 2027, participants will read the book, and in early March 2027, partner organizations will offer their locations for group discussions.

The group discussions will be held between March 1 and March 13, 2027. Participants who want to join the group discussion will sign up and attend one of the ten discussions in the locations closest to them.

Dèy tells the vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami, after she hears the terrifying sounds of gunfire while shopping for her daughter’s first-ever cell phone; she takes shelter in a restaurant called Oasis, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners, each praying to their respective gods.

Once she’s safely home, Magnolia hides the fact that she was at the mall shooting from everyone close to her. But given her life back, she begins to see it all clearly, and as if for the first time—what the extraordinary bond she has with her daughter, Zoë, really means to her, and what Zoë may feel in return; what the nearly broken relationship she has with her partner, Harrison, has cost her, despite his love for her and their daughter; why her mentally troubled mother—whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself—might be so ghost-haunted; what the source of her father’s pain, and his reason for seeking solace in the arms of a mistress, really is. As Magnolia struggles through the labyrinth of her past, she must also come to terms with the losses sustained that traumatic day, losses that we all bear witness to all too often in our troubling times.

Can love, can family, protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart, one’s soul? Which side will win out for Magnolia—and where does she really belong? Pulled between these questions, and her beloved, high-stakes choices and worlds—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is one of the most compelling characters that Danticat has ever created—a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: shimmering, flitting between choices, drawn to the light yet emitting her own.

Taking its title from the Creole word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance of sharing grief and leave-taking, but also of the ties of family—takeout dinners around a table, fresh dirt on a plant’s roots in the garden, swimming together in the azure seas. As Magnolia questions whether all has not yet been lost, Dèy celebrates the complexity of life in a brave and striking novel that is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with a signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).

The 2026-27 Western PA Book Read is being held in collaboration with Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and Steel Smiling, with support from The Pittsburgh Foundation.