With Songbirds, Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo) shines a light on social issues through the story of one woman's disappearance: "One day, Nisha vanished and turned to gold." Nisha is a Sri Lankan immigrant to Cyprus, where she works in the capital city of Nicosia as maid to Petra, a widow, and her nine-year-old daughter, Aliki. Petra's upstairs tenant Yiannis is Nisha's secret lover (maids are not permitted lovers). This absorbing novel opens after Nisha has gone missing, and is told in chapters that alternate between Petra's and Yiannis's points of view as they mourn and search for Nisha.
Nisha is representative of numerous migrant worker women in Cyprus, largely from Vietnam, Nepal, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Petra observes, "I had started to see the rhythm of these women with new eyes--how the whole neighborhood pulsed with their activity. They had been invisible to me before Nisha had gone missing."
Although her neighbors are quick to write off the disappearance as abandonment, with the assumptions of casual racism, Petra knows this is out of character. Nisha is devoted to Aliki, and besides she's left behind her passport and most precious possessions, relics of her late husband and her own daughter in Sri Lanka. The police won't help, so Petra mounts her own investigation.
Lefteri deftly weaves Yiannis's pain at the loss of his love with Petra's growing realizations about her own culture and Aliki's attachment to her missing caretaker. Songbirds is quietly urgent in its treatment of Nicosia's maids, thoughtful, compassionate and lyrical in its descriptions. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia