Join a book club that is reading Butter Honey Pig Bread!

Rainbow Skies

Rainbow Skies is a monthly adult book club where we meet to discuss books with LGBTQIA+ representation.

Butter Honey Pig Bread

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.

BUY THE BOOK

368 pages

Average rating: 7.69

39 RATINGS

|

2 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Shawn💜Reads
Feb 06, 2023
8/10 stars
I'm left wanting more. I love how the stories were told. I loved that the timelines of each woman's story lined up at the end. I'm glad they each found healing in their own ways. I may have to revisit this one one day.
ammareadabook
Aug 05, 2022
Gorgeous. This is a book that should be savored slowly, not devoured quickly.

See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.

More books by this author