My Reading Life

Finished October, 2025

Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a quietly heartbreaking novel—one that takes the statistics and headlines we so easily skim over and turns them into human faces, voices, and memories. As Margaret Atwood once wrote, “The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.” Books like this make those dreams real.

Through Nuri and Afra, a beekeeper and his wife forced to flee war-torn Aleppo, Lefteri shows how fragile safety can be. They could be any of us—living ordinary lives until the ground gives way. The novel reminds us that behind every news story is someone who once had a garden, a favorite meal, a friend’s laughter.

Drawing on her own experience volunteering in refugee camps in Greece, Lefteri writes with haunting authenticity about the couple’s perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward the United Kingdom. What makes The Beekeeper of Aleppo so affecting is its gentleness amid devastation. Nuri and Afra are relatively privileged—educated, once financially comfortable—yet their path is marked by loss, humiliation, dislocation, and the quiet erosion of identity that follows exile.

Lefteri alternates chapters between the couple’s present life in the UK and their memories of Syria and the journey that brought them there. The structure mirrors the disorientation of trauma, where past and present blur and healing feels uncertain. The novel grapples with unbearable themes—grief over a child’s death, the numbness of post-traumatic stress—but also with resilience: the stubborn instinct to rebuild, to love again, and to find beauty in small acts of kindness. Amid bigotry and suspicion, Lefteri still finds light in human empathy, in the quiet gestures that remind us of our shared humanity.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is not a difficult read stylistically—it’s a page-turner—but it leaves emotional aftershocks that linger. It reminds us that the life we take for granted can change in an instant, and that even amid ruin, tenderness survives. Like the bees Nuri tends, human beings, too, carry within them an instinct to create, to nurture, and to find their way home.