Alejo Carpentier's most celebrated book, The Kingdom of This World (first published as El reino de este mundo in 1949), recounts the events surrounding the Haitian Revolution (c. 1791–1804). The book follows the trials and tribulations of Ti Noël, an enslaved laborer on a colonial sugar plantation in Saint Domingue. The books' opening chapter depicts the gruesome scene in which Ti Noël's friend, Makandal, who is also enslaved, loses his arm in a violent sugar mill accident, forcing him to flee the plantation to evade certain death. In doing so, the events of the Revolution are set into motion. During this volatile era of war, imperial rule, and social change, Ti Noël struggles to find a place for himself as a freed man on an island where he was once enslaved. As Ti Noël's journal unfolds, so too do the historical events before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution.
Carpentier famously wrote The Kingdom of This World in a style of prose he called lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real). Known in English as Magical Realism, this style is uniquely tied to Latin American literature, depicting narratives through uncanny episodes that harness the potential of depicting worlds and events otherwise. For Carpentier, the history of this hemisphere is marvelous, if uneasy. Here, the word "marvelous" both recalls the unthinkable traumas of colonization, enslavement, displacement, and oppression as well as the awe-inspiring efforts to persist amid and overcome such injustices, inequities, and silences.