Honey by Imani Thompson audiobook review – a darkly entertaining campus thriller

Racial and gender politics are woven into a clever tale of murder and morals at Cambridge

Yrsa is a young Black undergraduate supervisor who is studying for a sociology PhD at Cambridge. She is tired of the disappointing men in her orbit: the ones she works with, sleeps with and who abuse her trust and that of her friends. She is also heartily sick of the students who attend her lectures and “the mix of boredom, doubt, arrogance that stares back at her. The blond flops of hair, Macs covered in stickers, non-discreet texters [when] she’s explaining – like not all lecturers here will – how the world works.”

Near the start of Honey, we find Yrsa counselling a devastated colleague, Nina, who has been sleeping with her married professor, Richardson. Not only has he reneged on his pledge to leave his wife, but he has been using Nina’s research and passing it off as his own.
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