The bee kingdom: a memoir

"The bee kingdom is the story of the author's search for her late maternal grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955), Egyptian polymath, romantic poet, and beekeeper. Its title comes from his eponymous bee science journal he published and edited in Cairo in the 1930s, but it is also a metaphor for her family's story: a collection of disparate characters with no unifying narrative, a swarm in search of a hive and a home. When Garnett came into possession of the enormous trove of papers, photographs, and other materials they left behind, new stories began to emerge. Some of these contained revelations deepened her understanding even as they undermined her assumptions and complicated her feelings, drawing her again and again to marginal figures in her grandfather's circle, such as the erased and forgotten women, tragic lovers, and scoundrels who'd left their mark on Abushady's his life and on history"--