Remember the Bees by Zineb Mekouar: A family’s heartbreak in a vanishing homeland

Remember the Bees by Zineb Mekouar, translated into English by Maren Baudet-Lackner, is a beautiful and heartbreaking novel about the ties between family, land, and tradition, and the grief of watching a place that has sustained generations become increasingly difficult to call home.

High in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, the village of Inzerki is home to an ancient communal apiary where bees have lived alongside people for centuries. For young Anir, becoming a beekeeper like his grandfather represents the continuation of a family inheritance, one that binds him to the land and the generations who came before him. Yet the world he hopes to inherit is changing. Rising temperatures are drying up springs and driving away the flowers that sustain the bees. As the natural environment deteriorates, the village’s future becomes increasingly uncertain, and the fractures within Anir’s own family begin to surface. Mekouar weaves these threads together into a moving story about what happens when the past that gives us our identity can no longer guarantee our future.

One of the things I found most affecting about this novel was the way it made me think about the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park and other ancestral sites across the U.S. American Southwest. The comparison is not literal; the extraordinary structures built into the hillside in Mekouar’s novel are home to bees rather than people. Instead, it was the questions surrounding these places and the people who once inhabited them that connected the two in my mind. When we look at the remains of those ancestral homes, we often wonder why their inhabitants left, what circumstances made their lives there unsustainable, and how they understood the changes unfolding around them as they were happening.

Inzerki seems to be approaching a similar reckoning. Its people have lived for centuries beneath the giant argan tree, but the environment that made their home possible is slipping away. Imagine knowing no other home, knowing that your family has belonged to the same place for generations, and then having to contemplate a future in which the land may no longer support your survival. Losing not only the place where you live but also the possibility of continuing the life that has always defined your family brings a unique kind of grief.

Anir’s family illustrates the different ways people respond when the future they imagined begins to disappear. His grandfather holds fast to the belief that they will remain in Inzerki forever, and he resents his son Omar for leaving the village to work in the city. To the older man, departure feels like a rejection of everything their family has inherited and preserved.

But Omar has not abandoned his homeland because he has stopped loving it. He has left because he believes earning money elsewhere is the only way to provide for his family, especially his wife, whose mental illness has left her in a condition that the villagers struggle to understand. He misses home desperately, yet he recognizes that love for a place cannot restore its dwindling water or bring back the flowers the bees need. His decision carries the sorrow of someone who feels the end approaching but still has people depending on him. Remaining loyal to the past and protecting his family’s future have become competing responsibilities, and there is no easy way to reconcile them.

Anir, meanwhile, cannot imagine wanting to live anywhere else. His connection to the bees is more than a childhood interest or a skill he hopes to inherit. Their lives and his own have been intertwined for so long that the prospect of separation seems almost unthinkable. He and his mother are already treated as outcasts because of his mother’s condition, leaving him with even fewer reasons to believe that another community would welcome them.

In the familiar landscape of Inzerki, however precarious their circumstances, he can still imagine a place for himself. His grandfather’s stories reinforce his sense of belonging, offering him a connection to the people who came before him and to the traditions that have survived through them. Anir’s determination to stay is moving because it comes from a child who has not yet accepted that the things he loves most might be taken from him. He wants the future to resemble the past, even as the world around him makes that increasingly difficult.

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The family’s struggles are inseparable from the grief surrounding Anir’s mother. Since the death of the baby she lost, Anir’s twin, she has not spoken a word. Her voice has been reduced to a recurring lullaby and a piercing cry, while her frequent breakdowns frighten the people around her. The villagers regard her with suspicion, unable or unwilling to comprehend the depth of her suffering. Anir himself has not been told the truth about his twin, leaving him to grow up within a family shaped by a loss he does not fully understand. The silence surrounding the baby’s death becomes another inheritance, one passed down not through stories but through the emotional distance and secrets that have come to define the household.

Mekouar handles this sorrow with considerable tenderness. Anir’s mother is not simply a source of mystery for him to solve, nor is her illness an obstacle that can be swept aside once the family’s secrets are revealed. Her grief has changed the lives of everyone around her, including those who love her but cannot reach her. The villagers’ fear also reveals how easily suffering can become another reason to exclude someone who is already vulnerable.

As Anir begins to understand more about his family’s past, the story draws connections between personal loss and the larger forces shaping life in Inzerki. The land is grieving in its own way, its familiar abundance giving way to scarcity, while the family carries a sorrow that has never been adequately acknowledged. Both require a form of attention that the people around them have struggled to provide.

The bees themselves give these themes their most powerful expression. Their survival depends on the relationship between the natural world and the people who have cared for them over generations. As the climate changes, the inherited knowledge and traditions of the beekeepers are no longer enough to protect their colonies from the conditions threatening them.

The loss extends beyond the bees, reaching into the cultural life of the community and the sense of continuity that has allowed its people to imagine a future. When the environment changes beyond recognition, what happens to the knowledge built around living in it? What becomes of a tradition when the conditions that sustained it disappear? These questions give the novel a reach beyond Inzerki, speaking to communities everywhere that are confronting environmental change while struggling to preserve their histories and ways of life.

For all its heartbreak, Remember the Bees is not a story without hope. The hope it offers does not depend on pretending that the losses are temporary or that love alone can reverse the damage already done. Instead, it emerges through Anir’s growing understanding of his family, the stories that connect him to his ancestors, and the possibility that confronting painful truths may allow people to find a way forward. Remembering becomes an act of care, a way of recognizing what has been lost without allowing that loss to erase everything that remains. The past cannot promise that Inzerki will endure forever, but it can help Anir understand what his home has given him and what he must carry with him, wherever the future leads.

Zineb Mekouar’s Remember the Bees, will be published on November 10, 2026. This is a novel for readers who appreciate literary fiction rooted in a strong sense of place, stories about complicated family bonds, and narratives that explore environmental change through the intimate experiences of ordinary people. I found it both beautiful and heartbreaking, with a sadness that reaches beyond the immediate tragedy of Anir’s family to encompass the possible disappearance of an entire way of life. The novel asks us to consider what it means to inherit a home, a history, and a responsibility to the generations who came before us when the future of all three is uncertain.

Have you ever visited an ancestral site that made you think about the people who once called it home, or read a novel that changed how you thought about the relationship between people and the places they inhabit? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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