Like the beehives he tends, Nuri Ibrahim exists at the mercy of forces larger than he. When war encroaches on him and his wife, Afra, they are forced to leave their lives in Syria behind and become refugees. 

Entrusting themselves to strangers, they journey toward England, where Nuri’s cousin Mustafa waits with his family, but it takes a long time to reunite with Mustafa. Bridging the distance between husband and wife, a rift forged by profound loss, will take just as long. The war has blinded them both: Afra has lost her sight, and Nuri often sees only what he wants to see.

In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, author Christy Lefteri draws from her experiences volunteering with refugees in Athens, Greece, to build a moving examination of how people make sense of who they were and who they have become. Through Syria, Turkey and Greece, Afra and Nuri move and wait while the pull of the past, both its dark tragedy and its former sunlit joy, travels with them. 

Hope is a thread Nuri loses, picks up and loses again. But no matter how bleak the present in which they find themselves, hope surfaces when it is most needed—in dreams, in visions, in emails, in an injured bee, in the blue sky, in memory. Not all memories are shadows; some are full of light.

Lefteri’s writing is observant and fluid, capturing the contours of life and relationships. The degradation Nuri and Afra must bear made me want to look away, but Lefteri’s thoughtful voice always brought me back. In defiance of all they have witnessed and endured, Nuri, Afra and Mustafa struggle mightily to be “people who bring life rather than death.” 

The stories we construct about ourselves and others are only one way of looking at things. Ayşegül Savaş’ young female protagonist in Walking on the Ceiling tells herself this truth as she sets out to piece together her own story.

With its innately self-conscious approach, Savaş’ first novel reads much like a diary. Nurunisa tries to understand her life by making an inventory of many pivotal events, mostly recalling her friendship with a writer she calls M. They met in Paris at a reading of one of his books and walked the city streets together talking of Istanbul. She, a daughter of Turkey, and he, an admirer of her historic birthplace, connect over memories. These walks with M are many things: two foreigners bonding over a shared city; a writer looking for his next muse; a retracing of familiar steps to find what was lost or uncover something new. Nurunisa wades through these recollections alongside memories of her youth, her time in London at university and stories of her mother and father, parsing her life for significance. Her father and mother are ghosts now, hazy at the edges and insubstantial. They anchor her no more. Yet her memories of them provide the richest material in the novel, and the reader may wish Savaş would spend more time mining those relationships. The writer M is purposefully enigmatic, which intrigues but leaves a feeling of incompletion at the same time.

Throughout, Savaş writes sensitively, and personal revelations fill the pages of Walking on the Ceiling. Sentences sometimes read like an elegy not just for the city but for Nurunisa’s past as well: “Istanbul was once an innocent place, with all its trustworthy names.” The poetic quality of the author’s prose draws you in, even if the self-reflection can feel burdensome at times. The novel’s short chapters string together carefully drawn vignettes that enhance the diaristic feel of her story. Nurunisa’s thoughts and memories threaten to spill over into full understanding but never quite do; she keeps them contained, much like how she herself is still hemmed in by the past.

As a child, Nurunisa would hold a small mirror to the ceiling and discovered a hidden white city there. In Walking on the Ceiling, she’s does the same thing with her own history, twisting and turning it to see what depths of meaning she can uncover from different angles.

Many Western readers will find Khaled Khalifa’s new novel unbearably grim. A story about three Syrian siblings’ quixotic quest to bury their dead father—a story whose central narrative marker of chronological progression is a man’s decomposing corpse—is not light reading. Nor does Khalifa feel obliged to provide his readers with much in the way of hope or even momentary relief. Death Is Hard Work moves in a way similar to the war it chronicles—mercilessly over the bones of its victims.

Like Khalifa’s previous novel, the masterpiece No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, Death Is Hard Work traces the familial connections of a Syrian clan caught up in the country’s brutal tide of repression and fear. The novel charts the efforts of Bolbol, Hussein and Fatima to transport their father’s body back to his home village, so as to bury him in accordance with his final wishes. No sooner do the siblings pile into a rickety van than they find themselves mired in a never-ending series of military checkpoints—some manned by regime soldiers, others by members of the resistance, still others by foreign extremists looking to cash in on the chaos of Syria’s civil war. 

Frequently and without warning, the novel strays from the present-day narrative into the histories, dreams and frustrations of its central characters. The result is something at the intersection of Faulkner and Kafka, a modern-day As I Lay Dying passed through the lens of maddening bureaucracy, hypocrisy and slaughter.

Readers looking for optimism or resolution need look elsewhere. Readers who want an unflinching account of one of recent history’s bloodiest civil wars will find in Khalifa’s latest work a story superficially colored by the many manifestations of death, but chiefly concerned with what a miraculous, Herculean thing it is to simply live.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage starred review, January 2019

After making an international splash with his 2015 debut, The Fishermen, and receiving a nomination for the Man Booker prize, Chigozie Obioma returns with an engrossing new epic. In An Orchestra of Minorities, Obioma blends the folklore of his country’s Igbo people with the narrative framework of Homer’s Greek classic The Odyssey to produce a multicultural fable that heralds a new master of magical realism.

Set in southeastern Nigeria, An Orchestra of Minorities tells the story of Chinonso, a lonely and humble poultry farmer who makes the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman, one who enjoys a much more privileged socioeconomic status and background than himself. Unnerved by her family’s strenuous objections to their match, Chinonso sells all his worldly possessions and travels overseas in order to secure an education, prove his worth and gain their approval to marry. Alas, misfortune plagues Chinonso as soon as he departs from Nigeria, and the fate that once drew the two lovers together now seems determined to keep them apart and break Chinonso’s spirit in the process.

After enduring much hardship and many years away in Cyprus, Chinonso returns home to discover that the only woman he has ever loved is perhaps even further out of reach than before, and he may also have lost the man that he once was during his time away.

It’s a special writer who can take the familiar tropes found within An Orchestra of Minorities and infuse them with new life, transforming them into something exciting and unexpected. Happily, Obioma is exactly such an author. Not only does the Nigerian backdrop add depth and interest to the tale, but the story itself is told from the perspective of Chinonso’s chi, a protector from the spirit realm who weaves in Igbo mythology and guides the narrative through both mortal and metaphysical dimensions, resulting in a unique and unforgettable reading experience.

Written in lambent prose and ambitious in scope, An Orchestra of Minorities is no fairy tale, but rather a tragic masterpiece.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles is a small book with a big story to tell. Billed as a novel, it is the largely true story of a young Afghan refugee’s rootless five-year journey across two continents. Enaiatollah Akbari shared his experience with Italian novelist Fabio Geda, who has reconstructed the events into a compelling narrative that maintains the youthful voice of this remarkable boy. Already a bestseller in Italy and France, the book has now been deftly translated into English by Howard Curtis.

This searing story of a boy’s struggle to survive has become an international sensation.

When Enaiat is about 10 years old (an exact record of his birth date does not exist), his father is killed by bandits while driving a truck to Iran. The Pashtun owners of the truck’s merchandise threaten to exact repayment for the goods by taking away Enaiat and his younger brother, so his mother smuggles him across the border into Pakistan, leaving him behind and returning alone to their isolated Afghan village. On his own in a strange land, the boy is forced to find menial work. Hearing that things are better for Shia Muslims in Iran, Enaiat pays a trafficker to smuggle him across the border, the first of many arduous journeys on which he will embark. Working on construction sites in Isfahan, in perpetual fear of being rounded up as an illegal and sent back to Afghanistan, he dreams of making his way to Europe.

The first leg of that trip to the West involves a month-long trek over the frozen mountains between Iran and Turkey, followed by three claustrophobic days packed with some 50 others in a hidden compartment beneath the bed of a truck. His travels from Turkey to Greece and then Venice are equally harrowing. Ultimately, he lands in Turin, and, with the help of some benevolent Italians, is educated and granted political asylum.

The details of Enaiat’s five-year ordeal, undeniably eye-opening and disturbing for Western readers, are perhaps no more or less astonishing than those that countless refugees could tell. What makes In the Sea There Are Crocodiles so persuasive is the boy’s voice, beautifully captured by Geda. Enaiat is resilient and resourceful, to be sure, but also sanguine and wise. He encounters adversity and altruism with equal equanimity, accepting his fate without self-pity. Forced to live independently and by his wits, the boy quickly sheds any vestiges of childhood, and readers must remind themselves that while he is struggling to survive, his counterparts in America and Europe are still cocooned in middle school. In the end, when Enaiat is finally able to track down his mother, telephone her and speak to her for the first time in years, their inarticulate conversation underscores not only the miles between them, but the lifetime that has passed in less than a decade. It is a heartbreaking moment that subtly underscores the plight of the displaced persons of the world, far too numerous to count.