A Handful of Honey by Annie Hawes | Review by Paula Marais
For those who have ventured during a holiday into Morocco or Algeria, A Handful of Honey, gives you answers to all those questions that you didn’t really get answered while you were travelling. How for instance, do you know that it is the women’s session at a hammam? Answer: a piece of cloth is hanging outside, but it is absent when it is time for the men to use the facility. Annie Hawes, the author, has a wonderful sense of place, picking up on the minutiae of daily life, relationships and realities in North Africa. This is the kind of armchair travelling when all your senses are assailed. You can almost taste the pigeon pastilla, smell the chicken tagine and hear the early morning muezzins calling people to prayer. Annie and her travelling companions clearly have the flexibility to accept the invitations of the people they meet along the way. How else to they end up staying with cannabis farmers or eating camel meat as they prepare to sleep outside in “a hotel with a thousand stars”? A Handful of Honey is not fast-paced and riveting, but it is a slow, comfortable journey that you can pick up whenever you have a yearning for the exotic.
(R110, Pan Books, ISBN 978-033-045-722-4)