A fellow book club member recently highly recommended I read Elif Shafak's novel A River In The Sky, but I haven't been able to get it from my library yet, so I started by reading an earlier novel by this Turkish/British author, The Island of Missing Trees (#1,293). I must say, I've never read anything like it before.
In many ways, it's a Romeo & Juliet story, featuring a Greek and Turkish couple from Cyprus in the early 1970s, when such a pairing was not allowed as the island was divided in a fierce civil war. It begins in a more recent London, however, with the couple's daughter acting out in her British classroom, scaring herself and her schoolmates. Her mother Defne had died less than a year ago, and Ada is feeling increasingly isolated from her botanist father. Kostas is absorbed by caring for a fig tree he is burying in their garden to preserve it, when someone from the past arrives to upset the household.
Told from a number of perspectives, including the fig tree itself, Kostas and Defne's story gradually unfolds from the 1970s to the recent past in fascinating glimpses of a lost Cyprus. Not just the human aspects, but the effect war has on nature as well.
I know I will be thinking about this powerfully written book for a long time. Highly recommended.
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