A Cemetery for Bees by Alina Dumitrescu

A Cemetery for Bees by Alina Dumitrescu

This autobiographical novel traces the journey of a woman from her youth in Socialist Eastern Europe to her transplanted life in Montreal, Canada. She is a precocious, thoughtful child, whose early life in Romania is marked by the scarcities of the time and the political games needed to survive, but she is not unhappy. Placed around her family's house are hives?the bees discourage the secret police from visiting too often?and they provide both a childish diversion and an overarching metaphor for departure and home. An elegant, candid book, A Cemetery for Bees is an elegy for childhood, a declaration of francophile love, and a complicated look at who we are, who we were, and where we might find ourselves.

Alina Dumitrescu was born in Moinești in what was then the Socialist Republic of Romania, and emigrated to Montrü¾Ž–”¼al in 1988, shortly before the fall of the Ceaușescu regime. Her schooling was not recognized in her adoptive country, and she undertook CEGEP and university studies in Quü¾Ž–”¼bec. She started writing again in the late 1990s, in French, publishing poetry and short fiction. Le cimetiü¾Ž†”¼re des abeilles, her first novel, was published by Triptyque in 2016, and was a finalist at the Festival du premier roman de Chambü¾Ž–”¼ry and won the Blue Metropolis/Conseil des arts de Montrü¾Ž–”¼al Diversity Prize.