Bitter Eden

A STONEWALL HONOR BOOK OF LITERATURE
ONE OF NPR'S GREAT READS OF 2014
A 2015 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

A modern classic being introduced to the United States for the first time, Tatamkhulu Afrika's autobiographical novel illuminating the profound and incomparable bonds forged between prisoners of war.

Bitter Eden is based on Tatamkhulu Afrika's own capture in North Africa and his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II in Italy and Germany. This frank and beautifully wrought novel deals with three men who must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in the male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life and the strange loyalties and deep bonds among the men are heartbreakingly depicted. Bitter Eden is a tender, bitter, deeply felt book of lives inexorably changed, and of a war whose ending does not bring peace.


About the Author

Tatamkhulu Afrika was born in Egypt in 1920 of an Arab father and a Turkish mother. He was brought to South Africa in 1923, orphaned, and raised by Christian foster parents. He served in World War II in the North African Campaign, and was a POW for three years in Italy and Germany. At the age of seventeen he published a novel in Great Britain entitled Broken Earth, but did not write again for fifty years. Bitter Eden was first published when he was eighty years old. He died in December 2002.