NIGHT PASSengers

Yanick Lahens

Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 232 pages, 2025

***Longlisted for the 2025 Prix Goncourt***

Why you should take a look at it?

√ A multi-generational epic of female resistance

√ A poetic and political charged tribute to Haitian heritage

√ A feminist celebration of silent power and enduring hope

Elizabeth was born in 1818, in the humid, fragrant cradle of New Orleans. From an early age, she learned the cost of being a woman in a world shaped by force and silence. Twice she narrowly escaped the brutality of men, and when a third—an old friend of her father's—sought to claim her, she did not yield. She fought. Not with noise, but with the quiet, immovable strength that had been passed down to her like a secret inheritance.

That strength had a source: her grandmother, a woman born in chains, who had crossed the sea from Haiti at the dawn of the century, trailing in the wake of the master who had once owned her and then set her free. In New Orleans, she became a merchant of some renown—respected, self-possessed, and untouched by any man’s desire thereafter. Her resistance was not loud. It was absolute.

In the dusk-lit rooms of her home, she initiated her granddaughter into the sacred mysteries of the old gods—Loa of shadow and fire, of earth and storm. From them Elizabeth drew power, identity, a sense of belonging that no man could take. So, when the moment came, her grandmother opened the door, said nothing, and let her go.

Elizabeth crossed the sea to Port-au-Prince, vanishing into another life. Years would pass before we found her again: a sovereign woman, sculptor of her own fate, and mother to a son who would one day walk through the city like a liberator.

Nearly half a century later, in 1867, Regina was born at the farthest edge of fortune—poor among the poor, her path all but written in dust. Nothing in her beginnings foretold the encounter that would shape her destiny. And yet, it was beside General Léonard Corvaseau that she would trace her own arc of freedom, one step at a time.

In this double portrait—two women, generations apart, bound by spirit more than blood—we glimpse a sacred recognition: a mutual understanding between “kindred souls, sisters who have escaped the harshness of convention.” In Passagères de nuit, the great Haitian novelist pays homage to all such women: those unnamed travelers of the night, from the stifling holds of slave ships to the margins of history—those who, despite all, refused to vanish.

Their courage does not shout. It burns—quiet, defiant, and enduring—as they face the cruelty of the world with luminous resistance.

In this new novel, as if wrenched from the tumult of her daily life in Port-au-Prince, Yanick Lahens offers a luminous tribute to the hope and resilience woven through the lineage of women from whom she descends. With each page, she gathers their voices—muffled by history, yet unbroken—and brings them into the light, fierce and unyielding in their quiet strength.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Yanick Lahens attended high school and university in France before returning to Haiti. During the following two years, she served in the office of the Minister of Culture. In 2014, she received the Prix Femina for Bain de lune (Moonbath, Deep Vellum, 2017). Lahens plays an active role in the development of her country's culture.