elif shafak | My BookClub Reviews

Tag Archives: elif shafak

April 6, 2025 · 10:33 am

The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak

I really enjoyed There are Rivers in the Sky. I leapt at the opportunity to read this one.

Here is the blurb …

A rich, magical new book on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited — her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

First, I knew nothing about Cyprus and the Greek and Turkish struggle over it. The writing is beautiful – how does someone write so well in a second language? I particularly enjoyed the chapters from the point of view of the fig. The story moves around in time, so what you think you know about the characters turns out to be a false assumption. We get to knows the characters slowly, like what would happen if you meet them in person. Ada’s mother has died, then we understand her mother was unwell, then that she drinks too much, and finally that her death might have been suicide.

Some of my favourite quotes

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.

Her voice was like a flying carpet that lifted her up and carried her against her will.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so another part can start all over again.

If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations.

You don’t fall in love in the midst of a civil war, when you are hemmed in by carnage and by hatred on all sides. You run away as fast as your legs can carry your fears, seeking basic survival and nothing else. With borrowed wings you take to the sky and soar away into the distance. And if you cannot leave, then you search for shelter, find a safe place where you can withdraw into yourself because now that everything has failed, all diplomatic negotiations and political consultations, you know it can only be an eye for an eye, hurt for hurt, and it is not safe anywhere outside your own tribe.

Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between,

It’s a beautiful, engrossing story full of hope and love, but also sadness and acknowledgement of the terrible things people do to one another.

A review

There are Rivers in the Sky – Elif Shafak

I a very dear friend lent this one to me. I didn’t know what to expect, but I trust her judgement. It is great – one of my favourite reads of the year (so far).

Here’s the blurb …

From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time. “Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf… you won’t regret it.” (Arundhati Roy)

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

This novel has the structure of a water molecule – H₂O. The two Hs are Narin and Zaleekah, and the O is Arthur. Their stories are separated by time, but connected. This is a watery novel with multitudes of water descriptions, metaphors and similes.

[about a rain drop] Inside its miniature orb, it holds the secret of infinity, a story uniquely its own.

But now a sense of foreboding tugs at his [Arthur] insides, like the pull of a river’s undercurrent

Just as a drop of rain or a pellet of hail, water in whatever form, will always remember, he too, will never forget.

It is as if love, by its fluid nature, its riverine force, is all about the melding of markers, to the extent that you can no longer tell where your being ends and another’s begins.

Yet the key element for her is, and always has been water. She says it washes away disease, purifies the mind, calms the heart. Water is the best cure for melancholy.

Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shows in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them.

It’s also about women and their place (or lack of place) in the world. Nisaba, the goddess of storytelling, replaced by Nabu. ISIS taking the Yasidi women and girls making them slaves (all kinds of slavery).

He does not look at her. It does not occur to him that he might frighten her with his proximity, having never had cause to feel such fear himself.

Same old story as Saoirse Ronan pointed out recently on Graham Norton.

It’s about family and what people are prepared to do for family.

It’s about colonialism and who owns the ancient artifacts.

Westerners take our past, our memories. And then they say, “Don’t worry, you can come and see them anytime”.

He [Arthur] firmly believes that he is here to help excavate and preserve antiquities that will surely be better off in the hands of Europeans than the natives.

This novel is breath-taking in its scope; Mesopotamia, Victorian London, modern London and modern Iraq. The writing is beautiful, the sense of place exquisite. Like all good writing, I feel like I have been on an adventure; trying to decipher cuneiform with Arthur, listening to Narin’s grand mother’s stories about their culture and heritage, cheering Zaleekah on as she explores new options (and realising just how far her family is prepared to go to protect one of its own).

Guardian review.

And my final quote