Honey and Bitterness

Bys: Tahar Ben Jelloun and Rita Nezami

Set in exotic Tangier, Honey and Bitterness unfolds as a chorus of monologues: Mourad, a retired civil servant haunted by his own corruption, and his wife Malika, equally tormented, have retreated to the basement of their once-prosperous home after a family tragedy has left their marriage a ruin of recrimination and silence. Their voices are interwoven with those of their sons, and of Samia, their teenage daughter, whose diary entries and poems scattered throughout the novel reveal a gifted and solitary young poet; and of Viad, the Mauritanian scholar without papers who has fetched up in Tangier dreaming of Europe and becomes an unlikely caregiver to the couple in their decline. Jelloun uses this intimate domestic tragedy as a lens on contemporary Morocco-its rampant corruption, the oppressed lives of women, the racism toward sub-Saharan Africans, and the enormous human cost extracted by a society that enforces silence on those it has already broken.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 195692177X
• ISBN13: 9781956921779
• Release Date: March 2027
• Publisher: Dialogos
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"