I’m not sure if there is anything I nearly left out, but there is something I definitely left out and those were chapters that I had written from Afra’s perspective. It is not developed much further, but the core of the novel focuses on the descriptions of life in the village and it's inhabitants. It is very powerful when it comes to the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, but the plot does not progress much from this, although I was highly satisfied with the ending. For many residents, this is the end of their idyllic lives but for some, it is a chance for rebirth. While I was on tour for Beekeeper I was often asked a very important question which got me thinking.

Christy Lefteri’s novel “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” is a beautiful novel about Syrian beekeeper Nuri and his artist wife Afra. Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. Raised in London, she released her first novel, A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, in 2010, and her second, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, in 2019.I ended up skim reading it from about half way through just so I could find out what happened without having to read the unnecessary vivid descriptions. Christy has a very poetic form of writing with lots of personification, vivid imagery and alliteration used to excellent effect.

I really wanted to like this book after reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo but just couldn't get into it. Even though her parents loved her very much and she led a very happy childhood, she always sensed that something unsettling had happened to them. All three are more integrated than was usual for their respective communities and have had love affair which crossed racial boundaries.I like it that when people read it they think at first that Nuri is the stronger of the two but later discover that it is in fact Afra with her deep, quiet strength. Your book is regularly discussed by book groups and read in libraries by people who could never imagine being in the situation that Nuri and Afra find themselves.

Some of the flashbacks are a little clumsy, as the author has to invent interruptions so that only a little of the story is told at a time. She is the author of Songbirds and the international bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Here is a quick description and cover image of book A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible written by Christy Lefteri which was published in 2010-3-1. I didn't mind the story being written in the view point of all the different characters but the descriptive writing was weird and annoying.Nisha's lover, Yiannis, is a poacher, hunting the tiny songbirds on their way to Africa each winter. If Lefteri had concentrated on the plot a bit more and tempered her tendency for self-indulgence then this could have been much better. I often found I had to take a glance back to pick up the thread with different characters but on the whole they blended together well to form a web of relationships, and victims and perpetrators alike suffered from the horrors of the war in Cyprus. I believe that it was one of the intentions of the author to make the book more interesting and to keep people reading so maybe it will work for others. Her first novel, A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.