Virtual Book Club – “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri

Please join us for the next Dayton Literary Peace Prize Virtual Book Club. We will be reading the 2020 Fiction Runner-up, The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri who will be in Dayton in November for the celebration of the 2020 winners. The discussion will be held on Wednesday, April 28th at 7:00 EST. Ron Rollins, former editor of Ideas and Voices for the Dayton Daily News will be moderating the discussion.

Based upon her personal experience of working in Greece at a refugee camp for women and children displaced by war, Christy Lefteri puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.

As reviewed in Time , “[Christy] Lefteri sensitively charts what it’s like when war comes home, alert to the subtle effects of trauma and grief. Nuri and Afra are not broadly sketched as victims, but rather suffer in different and complex ways from PTSD. . . By creating characters with such rich, complex inner lives, Lefteri shows that in order to stretch compassion to millions of people, it helps to begin with one.”—Time 

To learn more about this beautiful book, read the review in The Irish Times by Sorcha Pollak entitled “The Beekeeper of Aleppo:  Fictionalising the Refugee Crisis from Personal Experience.