Beckett is not writing about crisis in Haiti as an event to be explained. He is writing about what living with it feels like, and sometimes dying with it, when the crisis has no visible end and keeps producing further disasters, further emergencies, and further interventions.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Port-au-Prince, he traces how people make their way through ecological destruction, economic collapse, political turmoil, violence, and humanitarian catastrophe.

Running alongside that account is an interest in stories themselves, in what narrative can do to help make sense of a world and to convey what someone else's experience is like.