By Rebekah Dolmat
From the award-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri, comes Songbirds—an emotional and heartbreaking story inspired by real-life events that sheds light on the plight of migrant domestic workers in Cyprus.
Songbirds follows the story of Nisha—a widowed mother from Sri Lanka who has come to Cyprus to work as a nanny and housekeeper following her husband’s death. From the very beginning of the book, the reader knows that Nisha has gone missing but does not know why. Throughout the course of the book, even though the reader never meets Nisha in the present, they learn of her story through Petra, the woman she works for, and Yiannis, her love. It is through Petra and Yiannis’ thoughts and voices that the reader gets a sense of the woman, wife, mother, and worker that Nisha was.
When Nisha is discovered to be missing, both Petra and Yiannis report her disappearance, in separate instances, to the authorities. However, in both cases, their concerns are not taken seriously and are instead brushed away. The authorities suggest that Nisha has moved on and gone elsewhere, as many foreigners do, and do not consider her to be a person worth searching for. Petra and Yiannis disagree—they know that Nisha would never willingly leave, and they spend the rest of the book searching for her. What they discover in their search is absolutely tragic but unfortunate reality that many migrant workers face.
Lefteri states in her Author’s Note that this book is not an attempt to represent the voices of migrant workers or to speak for them, but instead is meant to explore the “ideologies, prejudices, circumstances, and underlying belief systems that can lead to very sad and often catastrophic events” . This book explores the idea of how a flawed system can trap people—people who are searching for a better life and for freedom but who instead find themselves more trapped than before, without any way to return home. So, while this book does not represent migrant worker voices, it does shed light on one of the many “catastrophic events” that can happen to them in their search for freedom.
While Songbirds is an emotional and heartbreaking story that pulls at the reader’s heartstrings with every turn of the page, it is also a beautifully written one. Lefteri’s prose is so elegant, and it has this poetic element to it that is not often seen. This beautiful writing and the heartbreaking story of Nisha will leave the reader thinking about this book long after the final page.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary review copy.