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.

Later, when Yrsa runs into Richardson and observes a bee crawling on the edge of his can of lemonade, she furtively flicks it into the drink. The resulting sting causes a fatal allergic reaction. As he lies on the ground dying, Yrsa declines to help and instead gets a taste for deadly retribution.

With shades of Promising Young Woman and My Sister, the Serial Killer, Imani Thompson’s debut is a darkly entertaining campus thriller that is cleverly threaded with feminist and race theory. Narrated with wit and verve by Chloë Sommer, Honey boldly examines what happens when a woman on the edge loses her moral compass and takes drastic action. “To kill and get away with it,” Yrsa reflects. “There’s something spectacular to it.”

• Available via The Borough Press, 10hr 55 min

Further listening

Looking at Women, Looking at War
Victoria Amelina, William Collins, 9hr 52 min
This unfinished account of the conflict in Ukraine was published after its author was killed by a Russian missile. As well as chronicling the outrages against her country, Amelina reports on the work done by Ukrainian women to survive and obtain justice. Jesse Vilinsky narrates.

A Different Kind of Power
Jacinda Ardern, Macmillan, 12hr 5min
A frank memoir in which the former prime minister of New Zealand reflects on her challenging premiership, during which she dealt with the mosque attacks in Christchurch and steered the country during the pandemic. Read by the author.