Handa's Surprise

Handa puts seven delicious fruits in a basket to take to her friend, Akeyo, in the next village: 'Won't Akeyo be surprised' she thinks to herself. But it's Handa who gets the bigger surprise. Arriving at her friend's, she learns that the basket now contains not the soft yellow banana, the sweet-smelling guava, the round juicy orange, the ripe red mango, the spiky-leaved pineapple, the creamy green avocado or the tangy purple passion fruit as she thought (monkey, ostrich, zebra, elephant, giraffe, antelope and parrot have helped themselves to these), but a mound of tangerines. A superb evocation in glowing water-colours of the rich Kenyan rural landscape and a marvellous shared joke between author and audience.