The faceless, nameless refugees we often read about are the subject of this heartbreaking novel. Their journey, their losses, and their hopes for the future stay with the reader long after the novel has ended. Lefteri writes beautiful prose in telling the tale of a family whose world is torn apart by war. She examines the consequences of loss, and how hope, even small slices of it, must prevail if people are to survive.

The wife of the narrator is not nameless. She is Afra. She is not faceless. In fact, she is beautiful. Afra, however, is blind. She loses her sight when a bomb explodes in Aleppo, where she, her husband Nuri, and her son live. Nuri, the narrator of the novel, is a beekeeper and Afra, an artist, who sells her work in the souks. After a tragedy involving their son, and as civil war breaks out, they have no option to leave the lives that they love, and start the tortuous journey into the unknown, in the hope that they may find asylum. Their journey takes them from Syria, through Turkey and Greece, and finally to Britain. In Britain, the couple strives to forge a new life while they wait to be processed for asylum in their new country. Lefteri gives the reader glimpses into what becomes ‘normal’ for a family living in Syria, a dangerous place. The tone does not escalate; there is no hysteria. ‘A bomb dropped in the darkness and the sky flashed, and I helped Afra get ready for bed.’ The juxtaposing of Nuri’s calm with the devastating situation surrounding them makes the encroaching war all the more menacing.

The imagery of beekeeping is a leitmotif throughout the novel. Bees are highly organised workers, have a structure to their work and a hierarchy to which they answer. In contrast to the bees, Nuri has so gently cared for, his and Afra’s turmoil is juxtaposed against the order of the life of the bees, a never-changing, secure existence. The destruction of the beehives by vandals foreshadows the unrest to come. ‘I will never forget the silence, that deep, never-ending silence. Without the clouds of bees above the field, we were faced with a stillness of light and sky. In that moment, as I stood at the edge of the field where the sun was slanting across the ruined hives, I had a feeling of emptiness, a quiet nothingness that entered me every time I inhaled.’

Later, in England, while they wait for processing, Nuri finds a wingless bee, ostracised from the hive. He knows she will not survive the night frost. ‘When I put my hand out, she crawls onto my finger and makes her way to my palm, and there she tucks in her legs and nestles, so I take her inside with me.’ Like the wingless bee, Nuri and Afra have had to leave the place they call home. They are outsiders, roaming the earth, homeless and stateless. Nuri says, ‘This is what I wanted: to be with Afra in a world that was still unbroken.’

So often the images we receive regarding Syria are of dust, broken concrete, dilapidated shops and houses, and guns and soldiers, in dry, desolate streets. Lefteri gives the reader a chance to see Syria as it once was through vivid descriptions of the landscape and food; the honey, lemon blossoms, aniseed, the souks and ‘alley ways of spices and soaps and teas and bronze and gold and silver and dried lemons and honey and herbs…’

The novel is structured into two sections for each chapter. The events of the couple’s new life in London are rendered in the present tense, while the journey to escape Aleppo and travel through Greece and Turkey with all the inherent dangers therein are rendered in the past tense. Eventually, the past catches up with the present, narrative-wise and structurally.

For anybody who has refugee compassion fatigue, you cannot help but be moved by this novel. In the sea of faces and the bodies crammed into the boats, there are human stories, like Nuri’s and Afra’s. There are histories, memories, legacies, grief, loss, and ultimately hope.

It’s fiction, but it’s also an account of what happens to thousands of desperate people every day. A searing, poignant novel not easily forgotten.