“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”

Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo is one of those rare books where the story is so engrossing and heart-wrenching, you’ll keep reading just so you can know how it ends.

I started this on a flight to Melbourne not too long ago, and I love flying because it lets me really get stuck into a book, without needing to worry about whatever else I also need to be doing (looking at you, student/work life).

The Beekeeper of Aleppo grabbed me instantly, and right away I felt a need to read quickly because I needed to try to understand what Nuri and Afra had been through, and if they were going to be okay.

When Aleppo becomes a war zone and unthinkable horror happen around them, Nuri, a local beekeeper, convinces his wife, Afra, they need to make the journey as refugees and seek asylum in the United Kingdom, where they have close friends who are already settled. The book goes between two timelines; their time in England seeking asylum and their journey through Europe amidst thousands of other refugees doing the same.

Nuri and Afra are each experiencing severe trauma from the things they’ve witnessed, they’re trying to find beauty in the world again, when they don’t know if it’ll ever be okay. This is the experience of the book that really shook me – as I was reading, I didn’t know if they were ever going to be okay. Knowing that their experiences were drawn from real experiences of refugees from Syria, you feel yourself forced to look at your own country and how it treats those seeking asylum. It gave me a deeper empathy for their plight, and that of people in similar situations.

As much as there were very difficult themes and plot lines throughout the book, this book also offered a lot of beauty, especially in the descriptions of beekeeping and bees. Lefteri weaves the narrative in such a way where you are forced to see the extreme difficulty of Nuri and Afra’s situation but also, the underside of hope and happiness that could be just around the next corner, if they could only get there.

For me, this book was at times heart-wrenching and emotionally difficult, but there was a solid line of hope that I caught onto early, and though I was swept up in the despair of Nuri and Afra’s situation, I held onto the hope I had for them that could be just on the next page if I kept on reading.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but would warn potential readers that you’re in for an emotional ride, so make sure your heart is ready before picking it up.