June 1, 2021
Petra is an optician in Cyprus whose husband dies just before the birth of their daughter Aliki. Petra hires a maid, Nisha, through an employment agency to keep house and provide childcare. Petra knows little about Nisha's family or background, and sees her as nothing more than a servant, even as Nisha runs the household for seven years and becomes a de facto mother to Aliki. Before coming to Cyprus, Nisha had lost her husband in a mining accident in their native Sri Lanka, and had to leave her home and her own baby daughter in order to earn an income. When Nisha suddenly disappears from Cyprus, there is initially little concern. No alarm is raised; no action is taken. Eventually, Petra begins to investigate and discovers how little she knows about Nisha. Then other immigrant maids go missing and Cyprus's police refuse to help, which raises questions on a far wider and systemic scale. VERDICT Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo) describes income disparity, predatory employment agencies, the mistreatment of workers, and how those who have the duty to protect and defend often casually shrug off that responsibility. Her characters are compelling and sometimes infuriatingly mired in their own oblivion. Readers interested in social inequities, human relations, and social justice will find this a good read. Recommended.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
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June 15, 2021
The disappearance of an immigrant working in Cyprus reveals secrets personal and political. Nisha is a migrant worker who left her home in Sri Lanka for a job as a nanny and housekeeper in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. Petra, a well-off optician who is Nisha's employer, is more dependent than she realizes on the nurturing, hardworking nanny. Yiannis, the tenant in an apartment in Petra's house, is having a secret affair with Nisha (which could get Nisha fired or even deported) and has fallen in love with her. When Nisha disappears without warning one night, Petra and Yiannis soon discover they don't know her at all. The novel brings a gradual revelation of Nisha's many secrets, and it uncovers Petra's and Yiannis' hidden pasts as well. Nisha, who left her own young daughter with family in Sri Lanka to find work, was the true mother figure to Aliki, Petra's 9-year-old daughter. Petra's relationship to the child has always been fraught; her husband was diagnosed with cancer weeks after she became pregnant, and he died before the baby's birth. Even before Nisha vanished, Aliki had stopped talking to her mother, and now Petra must examine her parenting. Yiannis left his rural roots behind to become successful in finance but crashed out of that career and now makes a living as a forager of wild foods for restaurants. He also has a lucrative secret occupation: poaching songbirds. Cyprus lies on major migration routes between Europe and Africa, and Yiannis and his fellow poachers catch thousands of the tiny birds with mist nets and glue sticks, then kill them and sell them as gourmet delicacies. Lefteri describes the poachers' methods in disturbing detail, and the birds serve too as a metaphor for human refugees. Petra reports Nisha's disappearance, but the police have no interest in looking for a missing migrant worker, so she searches on her own. Her quest leads her to a world of exploitation of migrants she never knew existed, and she and Yiannis join forces to try to uncover Nisha's fate. Although the book's dialogue can sometimes be stilted or preachy, its characters are engaging and its story moving. This well-crafted novel puts a poignantly human face on often invisible migrant workers.
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June 1, 2021
Nisha walked away from her employer's house one Sunday night and did not return. She had asked for time off her work as a maid, but her employer, Petra, had said no. After Nisha's disappearance, Petra turns the events of the day over and over in her mind, wondering what could have happened. She is not alone in her concern. Yiannis, Nisha's secret lover and Petra's tenant, worries that he drove her away with a proposal the night before. Petra soon discovers that all Nisha's treasures, her passport, and the gold ring Yiannis had offered her remain in her room, and with the police on the island of Cyprus not offering any assistance to find a missing Sri Lankan maid, they try to discover her whereabouts themselves. As the suspicious circumstances mount and Yiannis' illegal poaching activities come into play, Petra realizes that the woman who had been raising her daughter had a life and a history she had never bothered to learn. An aura of menace pervades this unflinching tale of loss and devotion.
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June 28, 2021
Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo) spins an affecting if didactic story of a woman’s mysterious disappearance from Cyprus. Left to piece together the story of Nisha’s absence are those who know her best: Petra, whom Nisha works for as a house cleaner, nanny, and cook; and Yiannis, a poacher, who is in a secret relationship with Nisha. As the mystery unfolds, more is revealed of the life Nisha left behind seven years earlier in Sri Lanka—including her two-year-old daughter, Kumari, with whom she has been able to speak only through Yiannis’s iPad in the middle of the night. Meanwhile Yiannis wishes he could quit poaching, but he would suffer violent consequences by walking away from his employers; and Petra, a privileged woman who has never formed a bond with her daughter, begins to realize how she’d neglected Nisha’s well-being. Woven throughout are beautiful descriptions of nature, such as the songbirds endangered by Yiannis and other poachers. As the two gradually piece together what happened to Nisha, Lefteri surveys hiring practices that exploit immigrants, as well as law enforcement’s dismissiveness toward Nisha’s case (“These people don’t care about their families.... That’s why they are able to come here”). While heavy-handed in its message, the novel is beautifully written and moving. Lefteri’s fans won’t be disappointed. Agent: Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary.