The tales of one family and their larger-than-many-lives sister, Antoine, weaves together the vibrant, epic story of Guadeloupe and its diaspora. This is Antoine’s life story: an ill-fated romance between her upper-class mother and farmer father; a childhood spent deep in the countryside; the splendors and slums of Guadeloupe’s great city, Pointe-à-Pitre; the eruption of modernity; the rifts in a deeply hierarchical society under colonial rule—and the reasons she left it al