This week, I found myself in a reading slump. It was not just the hot weather that had me down, but also a recurring pain in my left shoulder that made it hard to focus for long stretches. Reading felt like a struggle and I really hated it. I was reminded of how it often takes time to adjust to hardship, whether it is physical pain or the emotional toll of disengagement. What I did not realise was how my personal experience was a parallel of the novel’s characters as they face their own journey of adjustment in the midst of adversity until I completed the book.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his wife, Afra, as they flee war-torn Aleppo to seek refuge in the United Kingdom. The journey, filled with immense pain, loss, and the trauma of war, is a long one. But Nuri and Afra cling to their memories and their love as their only means of survival. It was emotionally turbulent to read.

The pacing of the book is deliberate, with shifts between the couple’s past life in Aleppo and their present life as refugees. At first, the structure made it hard for me to settle into the flow of the narrative, and I wondered if my way of finding my footing is a scaled down version of how the couple finds their footing in a foreign land, dealing with the pain of loss and the challenge of rebuilding lives from the ruins.

Then the contrast of grief between the couple. Lefteri did such a brilliant job with making grief both the heart of the novel, and the part which breaks your heart most. Their pain was so real and so familiar in the way people who love each other can still be completely alone in how they hurt. I cried reading the end: this is not just a story where tragedies are faceless; they are real people who have loved and lost deeply, but told through fictitious people like Nuri and Afra, as if to soften the impact of trying to survive a world that has erased the life of what we once knew.

Would I recommend The Beekeeper of Aleppo? In light of the ongoing crises around the world, this book is a necessary read, for us to know that hope exist despite the sorrow that permeates life. Reading this is more relevant than ever.