Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children's writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. The film adaptation - with a screenplay by Lewis herself - went on to win six Welsh BAFTAS and the Spirit of the Festival Award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival. Lewis's other screenwriting work includes BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden. Lewis is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth. Drift is her debut novel in the English language.
'A seed in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible' Old Welsh Proverb
One orchard, three women, eleven letters.
Hannah has lived at Berllan Deg all her life, her husband came to live at the orchard when they got married. Tonight, she prepares for his funeral as he lies in the parlour. Over fifty years of marriage, a lifetime of memories dissipating in the impossibility of his stillness. He was a writer and a beekeeper who came to understand the world through the language of bees. He has left her eleven letters; the exact same number as there are frames in a bee's nest. Each letter is an examination of an aspect of their marriage. The morning of the funeral, Sadie, Hannah's estranged little sister comes back home for the service. As the letters unfold, they reveal a devastating secret that will make Hannah have to re-evaluate her whole life.
Bitter Honey is a novel which brings three very different women together into a broken Eden and examines how they rebuild it on their own terms.