Lefteri gives
us an intimate
look at the
lives of one
couple
in literature beyond the accounts of vet-
eran fighters or war correspondents.
Nuri and Afra manage to escape their
shattered hometown, but they cannot
escape the memories that haunt them.
“You are lost in the darkness,” Afra tells
Nuri, reminding us that even if she is
the one who has lost her sight, he is
even more cut off from his loved ones—
and himself.
Lefteri’s slow-building narrative
rarely veers into sentimen-
tality or overwhelming
bleakness. Nuri’s love of bee-
keeping and Afra’s gift for
art, interspersed with hap-
pier recollections of Syria,
offer a glimpse of the beauty
still within their reach. By
creating characters with
such rich, complex inner lives, Lefteri
shows that in order to stretch compas-
sion to millions of people, it helps to
begin with one.
AfTer Two summers volunTeering
in a refugee center in Athens as thou-
sands of families flooded into Greece,
Christy Lefteri found herself wondering
what it means to see, and be seen. From
the question sprang her second novel,
which follows Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper,
and his wife Afra, an artist blinded by
an explosion, on a journey to find safety
in the U.K.
We tend to hear refugee stories in the
abstract: millions of peo-
ple fleeing war, poverty
and persecution—words
that carry no specifics.
But in The Beekeeper of
Aleppo, Lefteri gives us
a deeply researched, in-
timate look at the lives
of one couple. Narrated
by Nuri, the novel weaves together
two time lines: one starting in Aleppo
in 2015 as the couple decides to leave
Syria and make the dangerous journey
through Turkey and Greece, and the
other from a seaside town in England
the following year, where they are ap-
plying for asylum.
Lefteri subtly critiques media por-
trayals of refugees, asking us to delve
beyond the crisis imagery we see. In
one scene at the port of Piraeus in
Athens, there’s a flash of light as
a black object is pointed at Nuri:
“A gun? My breath caught in my
throat, I struggled to inhale, my
vision blurred, my neck and face
felt hot, my fingers numb. A
camera.” Nuri realizes it hadn’t
occurred to the photographer
that “he was taking a picture
of a real human.”
A former psycho-
therapist and the daughter
of Cypriot refugees, Left-
eri sensitively charts what
it’s like when war comes
home, alert to the subtle
effects of trauma and
grief. Nuri and Afra are
not broadly sketched
as victims, but rather suffer
in different and complex ways from
PTSD—a condition still rarely explored
FICTION
A journey from Aleppo
By Naina Bajekal
FICTION
Finding a
place to
call home
How do we define home? It’s a
perennial question in fiction,
but few stories interrogate the
intersection of community,
family and history in a more
heartbreaking way than the
eight in Edwidge Danticat’s new
collection.
The narratives in Everything
Inside trace primarily female
characters and their relation-
ships with Haiti, a country
they are all connected to in
different ways. In the first story,
a nurse’s assistant learns that
her ex-husband’s girlfriend has
been kidnapped. In another, a
mother copes with her nanny’s
AIDS diagnosis. And in what
might be the collection’s most
devastating piece, a woman
reconnects over dinner with a
past lover who lost his leg in
the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
Danticat, who was born in
Port-au-Prince, expertly blends
the crises of the country—
natural disasters, economic
inequality, violence—with her
characters’ personal dilem-
mas (love, loss and the space
that connects the two). The
National Book Award finalist
navigates an impressive bal-
ance between the personal and
the political as she explores
what it means to identify with a
specific piece of the world.
ÑAnnabel Gutterman
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