Keep moving forward and never look back: that's what the women of Yanick Lahens' family murmur to him in this powerful novel about roots.

The great Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens paints twinned portraits of her distant grandmothers, women who recognize in each other "a fellow sister who escaped the strictures of convention." In so doing, she offers up a magnificent tribute, starting with victims of the slave trade, to all "night passengers," history's forgotten whose tenacity and secret comradery resist the world's violence with luminous courage.