Butter Honey Pig Bread
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4.0 • 40 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Governor General's Literary Award, and Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.
Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won’t be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.
But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
For readers of African diasporic authors such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Nigerian Canadian artist and filmmaker Francesca Ekwuyasi explores whether a family can ever truly heal after an unspeakable tragedy in her spellbinding debut novel. The lives of twin sisters Kehinde and Taiye spin out of control after Kehinde suffers a terrible trauma, sending them each on separate journeys far from their Nigerian home. We follow Kehinde through her early adulthood as an artist in Montreal, struggling to build a life far away from her haunted past, while Taiye flees to London where she struggles to cope through one empty physical encounter after another. Expertly blending stark you-are-there detail with gorgeous flights of magical realism, Ekwuyasi captures the deep complexity of family relationships, illustrating how childhood trauma affects everyone in its emotional vicinity. We felt like we knew Kehinde and Taiye, who thrum with life even as they grow further and further apart. Butter Honey Pig Bread had us yearning to know if these women would ever reunite—and if time really does heal all wounds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ekwuyasi's magical debut delves into the reverberating effects of a Nigerian mother's choices on her twin daughters' lives. The stories of Kambirinachi and her daughters, Taiye and Kehinde, unfold in lyrical, emotionally affecting parallel narratives. As a girl, Kambirinachi knows herself to be an Ogbanje, a spirit child in Igbo tradition who curses one's family by repeatedly dying and being born again. After moving through the cycle multiple times, Kambirinachi chooses to stay alive. As a grown woman, she leaves her home in Abeokuta to study art in Lagos and, throughout her life, must make a constant effort not to listen to the voices of her Kin calling her back toward death and warning her that "she will soon learn." Starved of her own mother's love a woman who had three miscarriages and so saves all her affection for her husband Kambirinachi loves deeply, first her father, then her husband, and finally her twins. At 18, Kehinde leaves for Montreal, determined to leave behind the source of a trauma that gradually comes to light, while Taiye settles in London. Both are caught up in the consequences of Kambirinachi's choice to resist her fate, and work to heal old wounds on a return visit to Lagos. Written in sizzling prose, Ekwuyasi's assured, inspired debut will impress fans of Akwaeke Emezi.
Customer Reviews
Slow build, but worth the read
This book took me a while to complete, as the storyline took a leisurely path until the end, where everything tied beautifully together. The ending was bittersweet and was the perfect way to end the book. All in all, I enjoyed the author’s attention to detail, especially when she described Taiye’s cooking. It was a rich read.