The Beekeeper

Reviews

"Haunting and captivating—a powerful portrait of courage." — Elle UK

"Mikhail’s harrowing account of the horrors inflicted on women captured by Isis...A powerful reminder." — Financial Times

"The Beekeeper is a brutally important, electrifying, and lyrical true story." — Paige Van de Winkle, Foreward

"A searing portrait of courage." — New York Times Book Review

"Iraqi journalist and poet Mikhail lays bare the agonizing experiences of the Yazidi people at the hands of ISIS in this visceral account of the outskirts of modern day Iraq. In 2014, ISIS began invading villages of northern Iraq, killing most of the men and enslaving the women and children. Much of Mikhail’s account is made up of first-person testimonies of several survivors who speak of being repeatedly raped, sold to the highest bidder, and tortured. They recall losing their families and witnessing their children, raised by ISIS supporters, becoming “a distorted version” of who they once were. Mikhail also homes in on the rescue efforts of a man named Abdullah, a local beekeeper who used his knowledge of the region and the money he made selling honey in Iraq and Syria to cultivate a “hive of transporters and smugglers” to save women; he subsequently connected Mikhail to several survivors. Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others." — Publishers Weekly

"The stories in The Beekeeper are reminiscent of tales of escapees on the US’s Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s or during the Holocaust. The book is a paean for coexistence in a multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual Iraq. Powerful and difficult." — M. Lynx Qualey, The National

"Dunya Mikhail, award-winning poet, has gathered first-person stories from those who survived [an] unthinkable ordeal, as well as those who worked tirelessly to rescue them. We should all read it." — Peter Stanford, The Observer

"This remarkable book tells of one man’s attempts to fight back and to rescue his people from a life of horror. In the hands of Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi Assyrian poet, the stories of these women and their escape, with Abdullah’s help, become a horrifying tightrope walk. Abdullah’s story is a remarkable one, and it is told with great intensity by Mikhail." — Louise Callaghan, The Sunday Times (London)

"Remarkable. A child’s perspective mingles freely with the poet’s mature voice, both baffled by the paradoxes of so much beauty and so much destruction." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail, who has spoken of love as a response to a war-torn world–an aesthetic, a value, and a practice. " — Elizabeth Toohey, Christian Science Monitor