When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand’s English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead-a suicide-in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.
Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya’s crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology-and into the family history of Martiya’s victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa’s obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world.
Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and exquisitely plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo-scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.

“Ben Williams’s narration couldn’t be more perfect for this tragicomic novel of Haiti. Williams perfectly inhabits the wry, observant, somewhat detached traveling spouse of an aid worker. Williams’s talent is not just with the subtle inflections in English and Creole that give personality and heart to the colorful characters…His conversational delivery also enhances the listener’s understanding of Haiti’s confounding mix of politics and superstition.” — AudioFile Magazine

THE DARING, EAGERLY ANTICIPATED SECOND AUDIOBOOK BY THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD-NOMINATED AUTHOR OF FIELDWORK

Mischa Berlinski’s first novel, Fieldwork, was published in 2007 to rave reviews–Hilary Mantel called it “a quirky, often brilliant debut” and Stephen King said it was “a story that cooks like a mother”–and it was a finalist for the National Book Award. Now Berlinski returns with Peacekeeping, an equally enthralling story of love, politics, and death in the world’s most intriguing country: Haiti.

When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, he takes a job working for the UN, helping to train the Haitian police. He’s sent to the remote town of Jeremie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town’s complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. Soon he convinces the judge to oppose the corrupt but charismatic Senateur Maxim Bayard in an upcoming election. But when Terry falls in love with the judge’s wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster.

Tense, atmospheric, tightly plotted, and surprisingly funny, Peacekeeping confirms Berlinski’s gifts as a storyteller. Like Fieldwork, it explores a part of the world that is as fascinating as it is misunderstood–and takes us into the depths of the human soul, where the thirst for power and the need for love can overrun judgment and morality.