From The Bookshelves: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a novel by Christy Lefteri. In 2020, it won the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Here is the publisher’s pitch:

Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.

Nuri is sustained only by the knowledge that waiting for them is his cousin Mustafa, who has started an apiary in Yorkshire and is teaching fellow refugees beekeeping. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but dangers that would overwhelm even the bravest souls. Above all, they must make the difficult journey back to each other, a path once so familiar yet rendered foreign by the heartache of displacement.

Moving, intimate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a book for our times: a novel that at once reminds us that the most peaceful and ordinary lives can be utterly upended in unimaginable ways and brings a journey in faraway lands close to home, never to be forgotten.

The author, Christy Lefteri, is not herself Syrian, though she spent time volunteering at a refugee center in Athens prior to writing her book. Lefteri is Cyprian. Her parents, like her protagonists, fled war to resettle in the United Kingdom. And, as NPR reports, Lefteri “grew up in the shadow of trauma.” And that history clearly plays a part in her authorship of this award-winning novel.

-KitJ