From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti.

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos–and others are just looking to make it through another day.

Desperate for money—and survival—Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner Alix Variel, the adventurous only son of a socially prominent Haitian family. They set their sights on legendary shipwrecks that have been rumored to contain priceless treasures off a remote section of Haiti’s southern coast. Their ambition and exploration of these disastrous wrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents—one that involves Misha, Alix’s erudite sister, who stumbles onto an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office, and rookie CIA case officer Audrey O’Donnell, who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined.

Devil Makes Three’s depiction of blood politics, the machinations of power, and a country in the midst of upheaval is urgently and insistently resonant. This new novel is sure to cement Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the twenty-first century’s boldest and most perceptive writers.

Ben Fountain’s work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives in Dallas.

Mark Danner is a writer, reporter and educator who for more than three decades has written on war, politics and conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and written extensively on American politics, from Reagan to Trump. Danner holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley and is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. Among his books are The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, The Secret Way to War, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War and Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He co-wrote and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting and has written a series on US foreign policy and genocide, Corridors of Power, that will be aired on Showtime and the BBC in the spring of 2021. Danner’s work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Carey McWilliams Award, a Guggenheim and an Emmy. In 1999 Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association, and a resident curator at the Telluride Film Festival. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy and America’s role in the world. 

Ben Fountain photo courtesy of Thorne Anderson. Mark Danner photo courtesy of Dominique Nabokov.