Tremendous book! It really gives the reader a sense of the danger and loss of both property and even life, in order to make a new life in a different culture. It certainly helped that the author based her book on her own experience volunteering at a refugee camp. Learning about beekeeping was an added bonus.

Oh, how I loved this book! The way it wove the past and present together was wonderful. The reader follows Nuri, a beekeeper, and his wife Afra, a former artist, as they flee their world in Syria during the civil war. This is a love story, a story of conflict (emotional as well as war), vision or lack of it. I loved the way it was written. I had a hard time putting it down. Readers, please read the afterward as this gives great inside as to how the author came up with this book's premise. I will look for Lefteri's other books.

Thank you Ballentine Books and NetGalley for an advance copy.

A month later, and I'm still thinking about this book. What can I say that hasn't already been said by pretty much everyone in here? The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a heartstopper, a beautiful, glorious, tragically mesmerizing story and one I will carry with me for years and years.

I received this book compliments of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This is probably the easiest recommendation I could make: GO READ IT. Seriously. You absolutely won't regret it.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo tells the story of a Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his artist wife, Afra, living a simple life in beautiful pre-war Aleppo. However, tragedy strikes in the form of war, loss of life and livelihood, and Nuri and Afra set out in search of asylum in far away England. This book alternates chapters between the arduous journey as refugees and the present day, the "after," so to speak.

I was captivated quickly as the story flowed expertly. The prose was both heartbreaking and hopeful. I could visualize Aleppo as it used to be, and it saddens me to know what has become of it. The refugee experience told in this story is very much a current affair, and will definitely open your mind to the brave souls who risk everything for a better life.

Wow. Just...wow. This book was heartbreaking. It's historical fiction, but 100% based on the real Syrian Refugee crisis going on. The book centers around Nuri, a beekeeper, and his wife Afra, an artist and their struggles to escape war-torn Syria for the UK where Nuri's cousin has already been able to become a refugee. The path they have to take and the hardships they have to endure along their journey is so heartbreaking and it's made even worse to know that these are actual things that people have to go through just to try to make a better life for themselves. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a haunting book that will stick with you long after you finish reading it.

What an exquisitely crafted account of one couple’s seeking asylum in the wake of the [current] Syrian war! As I was reading this novel, I was thinking that the author must have had personal experience with these refugees as the story felt so very real. In the afterward I saw that, yes, she was one of the English women assigned to a UNICEF refugee station in Greece to assess and attend to their needs and to assist them with applications for requesting asylum in the UK.

The story starts out in Aleppo where Nuri, the husband, is a [professional] beekeeper in partnership with his friend Mustafa. The information about the business of beekeeping and the business of making commercial products from the honey was most interesting. Throughout the book we were given smatterings of information about bees, about different species of bees and about beekeeping. The author presented this information in a way that made the reader hunger for more!

Nuri and his wife, Afra, an artist, are the parents of a young son, Sami, who was killed by a bomb, just at a time when the bombing was thought to have ceased. Afra was blinded by the bombing.

There are many flashbacks throughout the novel which are not well delineated from the current action, but that was, obviously, by design. Confusing to the reader, but that was a useful device to expose Nuri’s state of mind in the traumas ensuing in their journey. Along with that device we had a contrast of Afra’s physical blindness with the mental and emotional blindness caused by Nuri’s confused state.

It was a beautiful, yet heart wrenching story of the plight of millions of innocent people caught up in the tragedies caused by current conflicts and of those who seek to help them as well as others who seek to use and abuse them.

I will definitely seek more books from Christy Lefteri!

I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher, Ballantine Books, in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautifully written story about a man and his wife fleeing Syria in an attempt to get to family in England. As you follow their journey from a war zone to multiple immigrant camps you will find yourself immersed in a world where the lines blur between what is real and what is the mind trying to cope with the horrific things that they have been through. Excellent read!

In an age of increasing awareness of the plight of refugees, Christy Lefteri's new novel focuses on the path of two Syrian refugees, Nuri, a beekeeper, and his wife Afro, an artist. The novel is split into two timelines: each chapter begins with their life in the UK awaiting for a decision on their asylum request and then shifts to their journey from Aleppo to England.

Despite the fact that Lefteri's novel covers just such an important topic, for most of the book I felt bored. Many chapters failed to progress the story, aiming for a reflective tone and landing on dull instead. While I appreciated Nuri and Afra's struggles, I didn't feel any connection to them. In conveying their refusal to process the emotions of their trauma, Lefteri ended up also failing to convey any emotion to me as a reader. Sadly, this is one of the August 2019 book releases I suggest passing on.

Christy Lefteri manages to balance the heartbreaking and the hopeful in this tale of refugees trying to make their way to safety and a new home after escaping war-torn Syria.

Lefteri has crafted a heartbreaking account of seeking asylum and finding more obstacles and violence. If fiction's goal is create empathy in the reader, this book accomplishes it by bounds.

I did not enjoy this book. It was too scattered and jammed with too much information. With encompasses there was a lot of.distraction so.it.did.not.flow.well. The characters were well descrined. Roo !any flashbacks and inconsistent.interruptions in the read I made it easy to be distracted. The only consistency was the references to how need work together.

I received an ARC of The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri. This book is about a married couple, Nuri and Afra, who have lost their young child to the war in Syria and decide to flee to England. This book is told in two timelines, the present where they are living in England, applying for asylum, and the past journey of leaving Syria and all the hardships they faced. This novel examines the difficulties of fleeing a war-torn country and really gives refugees a voice. This story helps people in safe countries understand more about why refugees want to come to a new country--even with all the problems that arise.

This story was heartbreaking; examining PTSD and grief in a really palpable way. I really grew attached to the characters and wanted so badly for everything to work out. I will say the only thing I wish was different was it didn't include much background info about Syria or their civil war. I didn't know much about it and had to Google for some answers on reasons behind the fighting. I gave this book 4 stars.

This book will be published on August 27, 2019 and I encourage you to pick it up.

From its first pages, this book will hit you hard. It depicts Nuri and his wife, Afra, and the disintegration of their life in Syria and their arduous journey to asylum in England. They lost their son to a bomb. Both are suffering from PTSD, although their symptoms are markedly different.
What can I say about a book like this? It is heartrending. It’s beautifully written. It comes across as totally real. But I still struggled with it. It’s very depressing, as you would expect. I had to keep putting the book down and walk away, giving myself time to process it. I loved his memories of the bees the best, those brief glimpses of beauty. It’s incredibly moving, haunting and gut wrenching,
Lefteri knows what she’s writing about. She worked as a volunteer at a refugee center in Athens for two years. As she writes, “The question I sought to answer with this book is what does it mean to see”.
My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

This beautiful story is about a husband and wife having to flee Syria to England, for safety. It talks about their horrific tales before and after. The author did such a beautiful job in writing this book. The writing is so beautiful and flows so easy. It’s not an easy read, but a must read.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows the story of Nuri and his wife Afra who are seeking asylum in England as refugees from Syria. Before their home and neighborhood was destroyed by the storm, Nuri was a prominent beekeeper with his cousin, Mustafa. Nuri and Afra are devastated to lose their home and everything they’ve ever known. Going through the immigration process is terrifying for them because don’t know if they will be granted asylum or be sent back to Syria. We see glimpses of their life now and the journey to England through intermittent flashbacks.

This novel is very painful to read at times because of all of the hardship the characters face, but I feel it is an important narrative to read. It amplifies the voices of the unsung and we get to see how each refugee’s journey was different as we meet various people and hear their stories through Nuri’s pov. It paints a vivid portrait of the harsh realities of immigration camps and the lives lost by many on a journey to a safer place:

“We found ourselves enclosed in barbed wire, and before us was a grim village with immaculate concrete walkways, wire-mesh fences, and white gravel. There were rows and rows of square makeshift cabins constructed of corrugated metal, for people to stay in until they got their papers . An empire of identification. “

Lefteri writes with great detail, making you feel all the emotions running through each characters mind. You feel their discomfort, pain and overwhelming sense of loss. You can feel how lost everyone is and how they drift from place to place trying to find solace. Lefteri pays great attention to detail in this story and while reading I could imagine the humming of the bees, the sea near Aleppo, and picture the horrible camps that Nuri and Afro stayed.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo was a very emotional read from start to finish. I liked that the author was inspired to write this book based on her own experiences of working in a refugee camp in Athens, Greece. At times it’s very difficult to read, but it’s also a very lyrical and beautiful story. It discusses topics including immigration, feeling broken, loss/grief, how to move forward in life when you are lost, and family.

I think it’s important to keep telling stories like this to make people more aware of things such as this that are going on in today’s world. These are real people with families and friends who have lost everything and are trying to find a safe place. It’s a heartbreaking piece of fiction but one that is well written.

Trigger Warnings: Mental Illness, Violence, Physical/Sexual Abuse

The Beekeeper of Aleppo could have been just one more of the many books about refugees and their hardships in.escaping their wartorn homes to search for a better life. But, Christy Lefteri deftly leads us along on their journey. What might have been a confusing time switch from past to present and back again, instead flowed seamlessly. I will definitely be recommending this well written and engaging book to my book clubs.

After I finished reading this, I almost wasn’t going to write a full review, but just say that it’s a heartbreaking, realistic rendering of the refugee experience, of people struggling to make it to a country that would provide asylum from a place where they have endured incredible loss and face imminent danger. In spite of the heartache, it’s a beautifully written story and I highly recommend it. That’s all I was going to say because I thought the book was so powerful, it would speak for itself. But I couldn’t leave it at that because this book, this story deserves a few more words. This author deserves a few more words about the amazing thing she has accomplished in this small volume.

Nuri, the Syrian beekeeper of the title and his wife Afra make a harrowing journey from Syria, through Turkey and Greece to the UK, a hard journey, traumatic at times from what Nuri sees and does there and the past he dreams about. Afra, his wife is suffering , blinded by the bombing is grieving an unimaginable loss to most of us. Nuri cares for her, seemingly so strong in the face of the adversity that has fallen on them, but he too is suffering and it manifests itself in such a heartbreaking way. He, too is suffering from the loss, has witnessed horrific things, and has lost his livelihood caring for bees in a business with his cousin. The loss of everything they held dear and now this profound grief and sense of displacement. As I read this, I wondered about Christy Lefteri and how she could be so intimately engaged in their sorrow and their struggle. Then I read her note at the end and realized that her deep compassion emanates from her experiences as a volunteer with refugees, from listening to their stories and from a personal connection to refugees - her parents. (This article describes that connection. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-beekeeper-of-aleppo-fictionalising-the-refugee-crisis-from-personal-experience-1.3900869)

I loved the writing, how she seamlessly bridges the past to the present through flashbacks and through Nuri’s dreams and nightmares and by connecting one chapter to another by a word. The last word of each chapter is continued with the title of the next chapter and that word begins the first sentence of that chapter. I found this very affecting. This is not a very long book, but it is not a quick one to read. It is incredibly sad and some of the images were reminiscent of the horrific ones I’ve seen on TV, as the refugee crisis is front and center in the news. I have read a number of novels about immigrants, but none until now about the journey to asylum. This is a stunning portrayal, profoundly emotional and thought provoking. If I had written a shorter review, I would have said, you need to read this.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Random House/Ballantine through NetGalley.

What? Another book about displaced refugees? If you subscribe to this theory, you definitely need to read this novel to awaken your senses. Yes, it is a novel about displaced refugees, but the writing is so lyrical and haunting taking us on an imaginative journey so powerful that we find ourselves immersed into the minds of these characters, feeling what this difficult journey must mean to them. I can't remember when I have felt so swept up, rocking like an emotional roller coaster ride as Nuri ,a beekeeper, and his wife Afra, try to leave their native Aleppo for England after a bomb strikes their town and kills their son, Sami. Nuri hopes to join Mustafa his dear friend who has fled to England and is cultivating English bees but the journey presents many problems related to dislocation, especially when you have a panoply of immigrants holed up in a central area and all crying for admittance into a country. But is the emotional dislocation that takes its greatest aim at the heart of this book. I would have given this a 5 star except sometimes the switching of place and time was a bit confusing to me, otherwise, a great story, demanding to be told in our uncivil age.

This a book that's beautifully written, yet at the same time, so hard to read. It focuses on a Syrian couple as they try to find a better life for themselves by seeking asylum in Europe. They get beaten down -sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively- at every stop along their journey. The only thing they never lose is hope, and that's about all they have left in the end, but somehow that almost feels like it's enough.

The author gives little details out at a time about the situations and what happened to the refugees, our main characters Nuri and Afra, so as not to overwhelm the readers, as obviously they were. They suffered many distressing events, and slowly make their way to England. They endure despite all the difficulties and trauma from before leaving their country, and what happens in the camps. PTSD is portrayed as almost sleepwalking, our narrator see's what's not there....

The writing was decent but I did not like the gimmick of the words, that flow from one scene to the next, as the section heading, which switches the time line. The first time I think it was neat, but it got old and annoying. Some may like this new way of writing, playing with the novel form. I think it was enough to just portray the situation of refugees without needing to experiment with the novel.

When we first meet Nuri, he is a beekeeper living in Aleppo, a city in Syria. We then meet his wife—a woman named Afra—and his cousin, business inspiration, and dear friend—Mustafa. Life is good. But before long, the war hits Aleppo and everything is turned upside down. We then follow Nuri and Afra as they embark on a dangerous, harrowing journey through Turkey and Greece in the hopes of reaching freedom and safety in England. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is both tragic and heartwarming, and will have you vacillating between crying and cheering. The book introduces strong characters, and gives a window into a moment of recent history that many Americans are, sadly, ill-formed about. It’s a powerful story, and one you won’t soon forget.