Bitter Melon

Bitter Melon is a tender, painful father-daughter novel about illness, estrangement, migration, masculinity, grief, Black British Caribbean family life and the unfinished work of learning how to love someone before time runs out. It follows Delroy, a Jamaican-born London bus driver, and his adult daughter Jalissa, a physicist and lecturer, as they travel to Jamaica together after years of distance. What begins as a late attempt at bonding becomes a race against Delroy’s rapidly advancing illness and Jalissa’s own fear of loss.

The novel opens with Delroy in Jamaica, waking after a night with Patricia, a younger woman he loves and desires. He is satisfied, relieved that he still feels sexually alive, but the morning is interrupted by panic: his little relative Marcie has gone missing in the bush while Jalissa was watching her. This crisis is the novel’s flash-forward. It immediately presents Jamaica as beautiful but dangerous, and Delroy and Jalissa’s relationship as one under pressure.

The story then moves back to London and Leeds. Delroy is an aging Jamaican man whose life has been built around food, sex, dominoes, work, male friendship and periodic returns to Jamaica. His weekly dominoes circle with Hennrick and the other men is sacred to him. But his body has begun to fail. His hand seizes; his fingers stop obeying him; his breathing worsens. He is terrified of becoming weak and dependent. He has told almost no one the truth.