Grey Bees: A captivating, heartwarming story about a gentle beekeeper caught up in the war in Ukraine

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His neighbour in the next street Pashka is very interesting too, and there are two women who make an appearance later in the book, Galya and Aisylu, who are fascinating. Here as elsewhere he remains peripheral to the local community -- camping in a fairly isolated spot -- but he witnesses the type of harassment the Tartar family is subject to from the authorities (and inadvertently contributes to their problems with a gift he leaves on their doorstep). Some bees fly, gather pollen, build honeycombs - live like the proletariat from day to day, from birth to death. There are snipers around, and the occasional shelling, but, exercising some caution, the two remaining inhabitants manage to continue with their lives here -- if in fairly limited fashion. It is not a book about the war as per se; it is a book about those souls affected the madness of the war and misinterpretation of the history as a foundation for human rights violations.

Kurkov handles the book’s solemn argument—how war destroys everyone’s lives—with a light touch and gently ironic humor that comes through beautifully in Boris Dralyuk’s translation, which alternates lush lyricism with wry humor .In 2014, armed Russian-backed separatists began seizing government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk and fighting Ukrainian forces, turning the Donbas into a grey zone. For the novel to kindle our spine, we must have “some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that [we] can neither define, nor dismiss.

where nature not only serves people but dotes on them; where the sun waits to depart until people have finished their daily tasks; where the air rings with countless unseen bells; where one can be free and invisible; where every living thing — every tree, every vine — has its own voice. Just skimming your review of this for now as I have a copy of the book to read and would rather not know too much about it beforehand.I never discovered a body, nor did I hear distant shelling, but the familiar details of that walk, the feeling of it, made the contrast of war so palpable. The church in Little Starhorodivka is razed by shelling and its candles lead to the arrest of a member of a Muslim family whom he tries to help.

All that remained was to pull the blanket up to his ears and fall asleep until the morning or until the cold woke him.The future war,” his frenemy replies, which disquiets even as it comforts, suggesting that the war currently tearing their waking world apart will be followed by yet another. Sketching the life of only one family, Kurkov hints at the stories of so many Crimean Tatars who have found themselves forced out of their homes once again .