Dining with the Dictator — Dany Laferriere

It is the early 1970s in Haiti. A shy adolescent boy, raised in a devout family of women, gets mixed up in a misunderstanding at the Macaya Bar in Port-au-Prince's Zone Rouge. Terrified that he has become a target for the Tontons Macoutes - Duvalier's feared and hated secret police - he searches desperately for somewhere to hide. There's really only one place where no one will think to look for him: right across the street at Miki's house, an environment totally at odds with the hushed, careful atmosphere of his own home. Miki and her girlfriends are the most irrepressible, beautiful and daring young women in Port-au-Prince. Now he finds himself spending a fateful few days among them, listening in on their conversations and observing their escapades and affairs. It is a weekend filled with self-discovery, and he returns home a changed person, one for whom life holds no more secrets.