At a time when most American memoirs practically groan under the weight of self-importance and bad-memory baggage (check out Brock Clarke’s rant on page 32), Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying provides a formidable example of an author who knows how to write about her family without hogging the stage. The writer refers to herself, sure, but never at the expense of her true subjects: her father, Andre, who emigrated from Haiti to Brooklyn in 1971; her uncle, Joseph, a preacher who remained in Port-au-Prince; and the ways that their lives radically differed until they converged in death.

“The idea wasn’t to talk about myself,” says the 38-year-old author, best known for novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory. “I set off trying to write about these two men and the fact that for 30 years, they lived in different countries, had very different lives, and all of a sudden, they’re both buried in Queens.”

Death hovers over chapter one, set in July 2004, when the author learns that Andre is suffering from pulmonary fibrosis. From there, Brother conjures up vibrant episodes in the Danticat family history in a tone that’s both clear-eyed and mythical. One typical chapter tells of Joseph’s throat-cancer diagnosis, and his trip to the U.S. to undergo a laryngectomy. He returns to Haiti voiceless. “There were many moments when I thought that my father’s and my uncle’s lives were like folklore,” the author says. “You know, going to the enchanted land and never coming back, or coming back without the ability to speak.”

Interspersed with these stories of near wonder are scenes of political turmoil in Haiti, which push the book toward its haunting moral core. In October 2004, after gangs threaten to kill Joseph, the preacher flees to Miami, where he’s detained by immigration officials. After a series of seizurelike attacks that go untreated, he dies.

Danticat and her ailing father requested a report on what had happened. “The first bunch of papers we got was 35 pages, with only two you could read—everything else was blacked out,” she recalls. “Eventually we got the rest.” With the help of these documents, Danticat re-creates her uncle’s final hours in masterful detail. “I wanted to lay out the facts, to tell a story and to let people come to their own conclusions,” she says. But by the end, it’s impossible  not to feel outrage at the bureaucracies that denied Joseph his humanity and his life.

Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf, $24) comes out Mon 10.