7 October 2025, There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak, 2024
Through an ancient poem, The Epic of Gilamesh and through the connections in a single drop of water, Shafak weaves a story of three lives that cross time, continents and cultures. Arthur born into poverty on the banks of the Thames in Victorian London, teaches himself in the British Museum to decipher the cuneiform tablets from the treasures of Nineveh and eventually to excavate at Nineveh by the River Tigris in his search for missing fragments of the poem. Narin, a Yazidi girl living in Turkey by the River Tigris travels with her grandmother in 2014 to her baptism but is caught up in a brutal conflict at the hands of ISIS militants. Zaleekhah, leaving her broken marriage and living on a houseboat on the River Thames, gradually comes to find uncomfortable family truths and travels to Castrum Kefa by the River Tigris in pursuit of redemption.
Shafak’s style is at times lyrical and mystical; she recounts the story of a single drop of water from 630 BCE to current day London, she explores the idea that water has memory, and imbues in her storytelling the connectedness and universality of experience. This is juxtaposed with brutal elements in her narrative; massacres repeated over time; the cruel exploitation of women and children and with big ideas and sharp questions about who owns history and its cultural artefacts. Shafak is acknowledged as ‘a unique and powerful voice in world literature’ (Ian McEwen) and as a group we found it a stimulating read although some found the mystical elements which are reminiscent of magical realism, distracting and unconvincing and the construction of the novel too obviously pitched to be an epic tale – too obviously staking its claim to be a great work of literature. By contrast others found her writing style which she has described as following where her characters lead, to be compelling, enthralling and convincing.