Kenyan Books

Bitter Honey is an account of love, laughter, pain, and triumph. Nafula is brought up by a caring but overburdened mother. Her father who is a policeman is always absent from home. She encounters Kim, and she is dying for his love. She even tricks him into confessing his love for her. When they join the University, she gets to learn from the world and chooses to get a ‘man’ for herself just like Njeri, her friend. Kim finds out and acts out of anger by jumping down from the third floor of a storey building. He didn’t want to live, only to be humiliated by a man old enough to be his father who was competing with him for love! Kim’s tragic jump leads to the arrest of Nafula and her ‘man’ on suspicion that they were responsible! On the other hand, Nafula’s mother goes on a fact-finding mission and she discovers that her husband, Bwire, has married another wife, Sofia, and impregnated Sofia’s younger sister Halima, who is a schoolgirl. Halima loses her life after Bwire tries to facilitate an abortion, and so he is on the run to avoid arrest and embarrassment. Indeed, love is so powerful that it can flatten a mountain and blood is thicker than water. Nafula later saves her father and becomes a unifying factor in her family. How she does this when she is happily married is what the reader needs to decipher. What about Kim’s family that is totally poor and had invested all it had in his Education?