As a disclaimer in advance of the review, the reading experience of this book has been highly influenced by my personal relation to the war in Ukraine. I feel like if I would have read it about two and half years ago, I might have perceived it in a different way. With the current situation in the autumn of 2023, this Syrian refugee story, a couple escaping from their war-torn town Aleppo, trying to make their way towards England, hit very close to home. The description of their emotional and physical turmoil, the obstacles they had to overcome, the language barriers, the issues with such forced emigration, all this reminded me of the stories that Ukrainian refugees told as well. I found the book to be touching, well-written, captivating and all in all, an extremely important story to create a better understanding for those who have never experienced what it feels like to be forced to leave the country they were born in or grew up in.

I will be making my way to England, to find my wife and daughter. Leave this place, Nuri, it is no longer home. Aleppo is now like the dead body of a loved one, it has no life, no soul, it is full of rotting blood.

p. 38

As I approached Mustafa’s house I could hear, even from a distance, the faint sound of music. I always found him sitting on the bed in his half-bombed room, vinyl playing on an old record player, biting and sucking at the end of his cigarette, the smoke rising in clouds above him, on the bed beside him a purring cat.

p. 35

The story touched upon various themes, it was about friendship, parenthood, the relation with one’s partner, the feelings of love and loss, very vivid descriptions of PTSD, living through trauma and overcoming it, but most importantly, what it’s like to leave one’s own country and the difficult way of making it to a specific destination as an immigrant. I really liked the way the story started, the style that was used, the vulnerability of the male character exposed from the beginning on, which made it really easy to connect with the narrative.

My only issue with the book was that it was somehow too perfect (I would have never thought before that I would one day express such a criticism). The transitions between the chapters were ideally crafted to make you stay invested and interested. Three different storylines were alternating, which made you want to continue reading and find out more about the characters. Two events were presented in the beginning but it wasn’t told how they actually took place, which made you also want to finally get to that part where it would be explained. It might have been due to the fact that the author wrote the story based on the accounts that she heard from refugees while working as a volunteer at an NGO in Athens. Maybe that’s why it felt to me like that special something was missing. Nevertheless, I would only reduce one ★ from the rating for it, since the book was really well written otherwise.

In the summer of 2016, and again in 2017, I found myself in Athens, working as a volunteer in a refugee center. […]

“The Beekeeper of Aleppo” is a work of fiction. But Nuri and Afra developed in my heart and mind as a result of every step I took beside the children and the families who made it to Greece.

p. 383-384

The author still managed to express feelings really well in words, some passages gave me the chills, others made me cry. The comparisons and descriptions she used were extremely vivid, so that you constantly had images in your head while reading, much more than I normally would when reading a novel. It was an emotional reading experience for sure, so I was glad that I read it within just two days, in time before a book club discussion. I could see the story weighing you down emotionally, so that would be the piece of warning I would give you if you have become interested in reading “The Beekeeper of Aleppo“. I’ll end the review with the first couple of phrases of how the book began in order to give you a feeling of what you can expect from the writing:

I am scared of my wife’s eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, grey stones, sea stones. Look at her. Look how she is sitting on the edge of the bed, her nightgown on the floor, rolling Mohammed’s marble around in her fingers and waiting for me to dress her.

p. 1

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-1-838-77001-3
Manilla Press, 2020 (first published in 2019)}