From Christy Lefteri, the prize-winning author of THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO, comes SONGBIRDS, a poignant and beautifully crafted story of a missing migrant woman and the community left to search for her amid their own secrets and prejudices.

Thirty-eight-year-old Nisha has worked as a maid --- read: nanny, housekeeper, chef and everything in between --- for wealthy widow Petra and her daughter, Aliki, for nine years. The work is grueling and the hours long, but Nisha adores Aliki and has a beautiful room full of antiques and a working relationship with Petra that is built on respect. The trio live on the island of Cyprus, far from Nisha’s native Sri Lanka, known for its setting as a battleground for wars between the Greeks and the Turks, and divided into a tentative peace in 1974.

Although talks of reunification surge through the partition every few years, most Cypriots seem content with a lack of violence as opposed to an abundance of peace. Like Petra and her family, many hire maids through agencies that outsource from other countries like Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Nepal, relying on the women to run their households while bemoaning their poor English, judging their willingness to leave their families and children, and reducing their freedoms to scant hours. So, you see, Nisha is lucky in many regards that she enjoys a close bond with her assigned family.

"Lefteri is a daring, uniquely creative author, and there is something utterly breathtaking in the way she unpacks a story so full of pain and mistreatment."

One night, Nisha makes Petra’s favorite dinner, an aromatic dhal curry, cleans the kitchen, tucks Aliki into bed...and disappears. Petra is confused at first, but when she realizes that Nisha has left her passport, a locket from her deceased husband and a lock of her own daughter’s hair, she is terrified. There is no way that Nisha would have left without her most precious items, or without saying goodbye to Aliki, whom she has loved as her own.

Petra waits a few days before approaching the police, but they assure her that Nisha most likely crossed the Green Line that divides the island for better work. Reading between the lines, she correctly assesses that Nisha is just an immigrant to them, not one of their own, and therefore not worth their time or effort. But as Petra takes over the household and her daughter’s care, she realizes that Nisha was the glue holding her family together. While Cyprus might not owe it to Nisha to find her, Petra certainly does.

In alternating chapters, we meet Yiannis, Petra’s upstairs tenant and Nisha’s lover, who recently upset Nisha with his own revelation. Desperate to make ends meet in a cruel economy, Yiannis has been illegally poaching songbirds, a dangerous job that, like any sort of illicit career, is difficult to leave with one’s life. Days before Nisha disappeared, Yiannis proposed, explaining that he could help Nisha support her family with his earnings, and maybe even take her home to Sri Lanka to begin life anew as a family, along with her daughter. Like Petra, Yiannis feels as if he alone has noticed Nisha’s disappearance, and when the two join forces to find her, they are forced to confront several hard truths about privilege, the migrant experience and their own blindspots when it comes to the woman they loved.

As Petra and Yiannis begin to talk to Nisha’s maid friends and examine hidden realities of life for a migrant worker, they push up against some very real villains, both human and systemic. With vivid, lyrical descriptions and the clear-eyed gaze of a reporter, Christy Lefteri explores the impossible choices faced by workers like Nisha and how these decisions --- often made out of desperation or danger --- leave them vulnerable to abuse, imprisonment and death. She uses ripped-from-the-headlines stories of missing migrant workers to write Nisha’s story, laying her very real flight from her hometown against the migration patterns of songbirds to expose the frailties of the system, the brutalities it breeds and the myriad ways we have turned a blind eye to the plight of migrant workers like Nisha. The parallels --- and the messages they convey --- are haunting, unavoidable and galvanizing.

Although SONGBIRDS is ostensibly about Nisha, we never get to meet her, which is a real shame. The Nisha who comes to life through Petra and Yiannis’ eyes is a heroine the likes of which few readers have ever seen --- a woman so accustomed to loss and pain that the mere fact of waking up to greet the day is a victory, whose sacrifices and setbacks speak to broad, universal truths about the injustices of the migrant worker economy. That she comes so beautifully alive is a testament to Lefteri’s masterful control of her plot and characters, and her ability to construct a story made up of pieces, prejudice and ignorance and turn it into something responsible, compassionate and profound. Lefteri is a daring, uniquely creative author, and there is something utterly breathtaking in the way she unpacks a story so full of pain and mistreatment.

An urgent, compelling story about migrant workers, SONGBIRDS is a fantastic follow-up to THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO --- yet another daring and moving novel from an author deserving of a long and storied career.