This book relates the experience of Syrian refugees attempting to flee their home from the scourges of war. While this is a novel, the unimaginable horrors obviously ring true. It is quite a difficult book to read but everyone should read it, specifically because of the difficulty and timeliness.
The ever pervasive theme of "what does one see" is so well-explored and in such different contexts. This is a must-read.

This book is definitely worth a read! It's important for authors to continue to write from multicultural perspectives - even if the reader doesn't have a passport, it feels as though they've traveled a thousand miles through the words on the page. Without giving too much away, I would definitely recommend this beautifully written, heart-wrenching book.

I really want to like this novel and because of that, I'm going to put it down, walk away, and try it again when I've taken a break. There are so many aspects that I find appealing to the idea of this novel that I don't want to pan it until I've really given it a try. For now I'm rating it as "good" and will come back when I've given it another shot with a final update.

This is a very good book that is very hard to read. Probably one of the hardest books to ingest that I have read in quite some time. The story is so raw and real that you feel the pain and sorrow and grief of the characters. But it is also beautifully written and sincere. I had to take this one in very slowly, but it was worth it in the end.

This was one of the better books I read in 2019, and I have already adopted it for my Modern British Literature course. It's poignant and engaging, with rich characters that propel the narrative without the need for action-packed scenes or hugely traumatic storylines.

This is the heartbreaking story of Syrian refugees Nuri, Afra and their son Sami. This well written, gripping novel follows this family as they weather the horrors of war in their country and ultimately decide to leave. Nuri is a successful beekeeper with his cousin Mustafa. Afra is an artist and when she witnesses her son Sami's death, she is blinded by the trauma. Nuri and Mustafa's beehives are deliberately burned and destroyed, resulting in Mustafa's decision to leave for Europe with his family. Nuri and Afra stay behind for awhile and then they too join the difficult and dangerous exodus out of Syria, winding up in Greece before they arrive in England where Nuri hopes to join Mustafa in a new beekeeping business.

Ms. Lefteri has produced a book which will make you very grateful for the food in your home, the roof over your head and the safety of your neighborhood. Nuri and Afra's story will stay with you long after you have finished this book. It is truly unforgettable and I am very glad I was able to read it.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author Christy Lefteri, and the publisher Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the wonderful experience of reading this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Nuri is a beekeeper in Aleppo, Syria, living a quiet life with his wife Afra, an artist, and their son, Sami. They are forced to flee Aleppo for Britain when the war destroys everything around them, including taking the life of their dear son.

I enjoyed this story of their journey to find safety and each other again after their horrible losses. The romance that still exists between Nuri and Afra after such tragedies is both painfully and beautifully written, inspiring hope in the most awful situations.

This book was incredible, but not an easy one to read. It was filled with heart ache and devastation. Without giving too much away, it was a book giving a voice to the refugee experience. It was horrifying, especially know that these atrocities were occuring in my life time. I would highly recommend this book to everyone looking to diversify their reading and learn more about the world, but be prepared for heartache.

I received an ARC courteous of NetGalley, the author and publisher.

An unforgettable story of love and a mother who was blinded by loss and survival. This was a geographical, mesmerizing, tale that was raw. Immigration is a hard subject to tackle in any form and this book did an amazing job of looking in-depth at just that and what it takes, what one goes through, and how at the core of it is survival. This story was haunting, sad, and yet beautiful.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri affected me much more than I expected. While this book is a work of fiction, it still made me feel all kinds of emotions that I was not expecting. It shows that Lefteri did a lot of research and has personal experience with helping refugees because I cannot see someone coming up with all of these details unless they have experiences this themselves or have talked to those that have. She tells us about the highs and lows, how you can love yet fear your home, how even small things can have big consequences, and how love can push you to your limits but also help pull you through the hardest times of your life. I really enjoy books with historical relevance and this one really hit the mark.

A gorgeous story! Unputdownable! I loved it. Highly recommend.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for my ARC. All opinions are my own.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a beautiful story of tragedy and hope. The story of Nuri and his wife, Afra, takes place England while seeking asylum and their escape from Syria. This book is less about the physical trauma that these refugees have gone through and more of the psychological. By the end of the story Nuri and Afra are beginning to acknowledge what has happened and heal. While this isn't a fun, easy going read I could not put it down.

What a stunning depiction of the refugee crisis. This timely book held my attention from start to finish and I felt so drawn to every character. I wanted to see them all find what they needed. The depictions of refugee camps were difficult to read but so necessary.

I loved this book ... the people, the places, the story. It touched my heart in so many ways, and I learned so much about the refugee life. This was a book that took the reader through a range of emotions, but ended with hope.
On a more practical note, there were a few issues I found. The characters were not described well at the beginning, and I gradually realized that I was picturing them incorrectly. Also, the author really needed to include a map in the book. I spent a lot of time studying maps to be able to picture their journey better.
Thank you so much to NetGalley for providing this ARC! I highly recommend this one!

Thank you, Net Galley and Ballantine Books for a chance to read the ARC.

Not far into this book, I felt like I'd been punched in the throat. What does it mean to be a refugee? Who are these people and what have they been through to reach relative safety in countries where many of the citizens don't want them? What horrors made them flee their homes, livelihoods, families, culture, and a way of life? This is a compelling read and I could not stop reading about Nuri, the beekeeper from Aleppo and his blind wife, Afra.

Lefteri worked in refugee camps in Greece and was compelled to tell the stories she heard, the suffering she witnessed, and the enduring hope she found. Her wonderful novel will stay in my mind for a long time to come. In fact, I now have a book hangover, you know that feeling where you can't settle into another read right away; I miss hearing about Afra and Nuri.

As an aside, I loved the literary device of ending each chapter without finishing the sentence. The title of the next chapter completes the sentence of the previous chapter as well as begins the first sentence of the next. Lovely. Five Big Stars.

I’ve spent my morning reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which was written by a woman who volunteered at a refugee camp in Greece. I highly recommend it.

What a wonderful book, I just loved it. My book club read it and I'm so thankful that I had an opportunity to read it. It's a tough read, so sad and heartbreaking at times, but it leaves you with hope. I believe it portrays refugee camps accurately, tying to escape whatever heart break is going on in your home land and the struggles of getting out of that situation and assimilating into a new life.

I liked the back and forth between the past and the present and although it is incredibly sad and wrenching, I think the author did a fabulous job writing everything.

Nuri the beekeeper finds himself forced to leave Aleppo, Syria with his wife Afra, an artist. He and his wife make the harrowing journey through Turkey and Greece. Their final destination is Britain where his cousin Mustafa waits with new beehives and the opportunity to teach beekeeping to refugees. The journey includes peril, though, including danger, homelessness, PTSD, and rape.
The story moves between three timelines - the present, the couple's refuge journey, and Nuri's young adult years. In places, the changing timeline can be confusing, but the author uses the same word to connect sections, which is a poetic technique.
In "The Beekeeper of Aleppo," author Christi Lefteri writes a beautiful yet heartbreaking story. What makes it even more powerful is that it could be true. In fact, the author drew on firsthand experiences and testimonies as she wrote this book.
I highly recommend this book. It tells a story about the perils Syrian refugees face, and this story needs to be heard.

A beautiful prose of the vulnerability of the human spirit, the love between a broken man and his blind wife, and the hope of raising bees in a new home. Nuri and his wife Afra must leave everything they know in Syria. As their country is ravaged by war, Nuri must convince his blind wife they have no future and no hope in Syria. That they must escape to England in hopes to meet with Nuri's cousin and start again their beekeeping business.

This novel is driven by the art of beekeeping as it weaves the lessons learned by the will to go on. Another driving force is the blindness of Afra. Afra does not want to leave Syria as she is grieving heavily of the loss of her son. The bomb that killed her son also caused her blindness. As Nuri always as cared for his bees with compassion, respect and diligence, he now carries that to his wife. He is gentle but he questions what love is. You sense the overwhelming emotions of all that his family has gone thru and the fight to keep going. How do you survive the darkness that overcomes.

Their journey to refugee camps and the others they meet, you see a shift of resolve, vulnerability, and who is in the darkness. As their journey becomes more overwhelming, Nuri seeps into darkness while his blind wife seems to see the light of reality.

The narration is done well. Spoken with Nuri's voice as each chapter has a transition by a single word that separates the past and the present. It is done quite well and very lovely.

I was quite taken with the beauty of vulnerability. Highly recommend.

A Special Thank you to Random House Publishing and Netgalley for the ARC and the opportunity to post an honest review

For years, the world has watched as stories of refugees arriving in foreign lands --- dead or alive --- are ridiculed, threatened and prematurely denied asylum and sent back to their war-torn homes. As gritty as the news can be, however, it is often too easy to distance oneself from the reality of the horrors of the refugee crisis. This is where fiction, particularly works like THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO, comes in, to remind us of our capacity for love, empathy and hope.

From the very first page, Christy Lefteri’s book is gripping and poignant. It is told from the point of view of Nuri, a Syrian refugee and former beekeeper. Though he and his wife, Afra, have arrived in the United Kingdom, they have lost nearly everything in the journey --- including Afra’s sight. Blind and in pain, Afra relies on her husband for everything, even as they sit waiting for approval to see a doctor and be granted asylum. In chapters alternating between their life in a boarding house and their journey as refugees to get there, Lefteri presents readers with a powerful and unflinching look at the refugee crisis and reminds us that we cannot look away any longer.

Nuri is clearly a strong, determined man with plenty of good character, but as he chronicles his family’s journey from war-torn Syria through Turkey, Greece and finally the UK, he exposes a darker side, one that has suffered unimaginable and traumatic losses. Nuri and Afra were happy once, with Nuri working as a highly successful beekeeper with his cousin, Mustafa, and Afra painting and looking after their young son, Sami. Though Nuri and his cousin were peaceful men, the war soon came for them, taking Mustafa’s son from him and forcing him and his remaining family to flee. Like too many, Nuri and Afra waited too long and were forced to escape in the dark of night, leaving their home, Afra’s vision and the body of their only son behind. This loss reverberates through the book, not only in quiet moments of grief but in heated moments of resentment and tension between Nuri and Afra that follow them far past the deserts of Syria.

From this point, Lefteri whisks readers through heart-pounding escapes through checkpoints, hazardous journeys in rubber boats, and, perhaps most terrifying of all, camps laden with traumatized --- and sometimes dangerous --- strangers. Lefteri never shies away from an honest description, from dead bodies to snipers and even rape, but she makes it clear that this is only one story, and the world is full of others that are possibly even more horrifying. Regardless of how closely you have followed the refugee crisis, I am sure that all readers will take something new away from this book --- I, for one, did not realize just how many stops and starts there are on the road to safety. Nuri and his wife bargain and haggle with numerous men, none of whom seem to care about the people they are helping, but rather what they can take from those who already have nothing. Throughout it all, Nuri and Afra (like so many before them) must struggle to remain hopeful, even as they can barely look at or touch one another, and are dealing with the psychological effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Nuri recalls his journey to the boarding house where he and Afra await their asylum interview, he begins to befriend the other refugees staying with them --- from an elderly Moroccan man obsessed with British idioms, to Diomande, a Somalian refugee whose denial of the horrors he faced threatens to send him right back into the war zone. Lefteri delves deep into the idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of the systems meant to help these displaced people: in one particularly frustrating scene, Nuri, having waited months for the proper paperwork to see a doctor, is turned away because his social worker neglected to put his address on the form. Equally disturbing is the asylum interview process, in which Nuri is asked seemingly pointless questions punctuated by voyeuristic and cruel ones with little regard for how he will feel after replying --- or if there ever can be a right answer to a question like “Can you say something special about your deceased son?”

Perhaps most gripping of all is Nuri’s personal battle with his mind, which seems to have turned on him, tricking him into seeing things that aren’t there and speaking to ghosts. As he comes to terms with his situation, he begins to wonder if he has lost all hope and that is why he is struggling. Though readers will have met him only at the worst time of his life, they will come to love Nuri and root for him and Afra to rekindle their love and turn to one another for safety and redemption. Their love story is the heart of the book, and Lefteri writes it as deftly and gorgeously as she pens even the most devastating war scene.

Alternating between the two most traumatic timelines of Nuri’s life, Lefteri centers on the theme of blindness --- not only Afra’s, but Nuri’s own inability to see his emotional distress and, of course, the world’s willingness to turn a blind eye to everything people like Nuri and Afra have endured. The author is uniquely qualified to write this book, having worked as a UNICEF volunteer at a refugee center in Athens, Greece, and she herself is the daughter of Cypriot refugees. Still, she writes with the compassion and horror of a person who is seeing the crisis for the first time, and it adds a whole new level of urgency and terror to her beautifully written book. Even when she is describing the absolute worst sides of humanity, Lefteri writes lyrically and poetically, using every word to its fullest extent without wasting a moment of her readers' time.

Haunting, illuminating and exploding with awareness, THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO represents the greatest gift of fiction: to inspire empathy in all readers.