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The Beekeeper of Sinjar
by Dunya Mikhail
(Serpent's Tail, £10.99)
AN ACCOUNT of lives destroyed and saved amid the chaos of northern Iraq and Syria, Dunya Mikhail's The Beekeeper of Sinjar has echoes of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark.
In his work of creative non-fiction, the eponymous beekeeper Abdullah Sherem risks his life daily to rescue the Yazidi women of northern Iraq who are kidnapped, subjugated and enslaved by Daesh.
Their struggles are explored through telephone conversations between Mikhail —an Iraqi poet now living and teaching in the US — and Sherem, who recounts the harrowing stories of women and girls he’s met and smuggled to safety.
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