There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

A couple of years ago now I read the amazing The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak which I reviewed here. Right then and there I knew that I wanted to read more from her! I do have a couple of her books waiting to be read on my Kindle, but as soon as I heard about this latest book, I decided that was going to be the one I read!

This is a big, rambling story. It is told in three timelines, and linking them all together is a single drop of water.

The first, and most interesting, story is that of a young baby who is born on the banks of the Thames and is named King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, which is obviously quite the mouthful.  Arthur is born in poverty to an alcoholic father and a mother who struggles to keep food on the table for her children at the best of times, but is also plagued with mental health episodes.. From a young age, Arthur has to bring in money, however, he can. What he lacks in worldly goods though, he more than makes up with his prodigious memory. He can recall the tiniest detail of a meeting with someone, of something he has seen. Eventually he finds work at a printer which gives him the opportunity to read across a wide variety of subjects. 

One day, he finds himself at the gates of the British Museum as tow large sculptures known as lamassus are hauled into the museum, which leads to his lifelong obsession with Mesopotamia, eventually including work at the museum translating clay tablets which previously were unintelligible. He becomes obsessed with finding the missing fragments of the poem we now now as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Whilst Arthur's life story sounds too unlikely to be true, it is in fact inspired by the life of a man named  George Smith, which makes the novel even more fascinating 

The second strand of this story starts in 2010 with a young Yazidi girl named Narin, who has a disorder which means that she is losing her hearing. Her grandmother, who has the ability to divine water and other skills as a healer, knows that they are going to have to leave their home on the banks of the River Tigris very soon as the Turkish government is going to be building a dam and their village will be destroyed. This is not the first time that the Yazidi have been displaced. They have long been persecuted, believed to be devil-worshippers and idolaters.

Narin's grandmother is determined to take her back to Iraq, for her formal baptism, a journey that is fraught with dangers. Once they do get back to Iraq, they find that the Yazidi's are still being persecuted, but this time it is by ISIS, with heartbreaking outcomes. At times, this part of the book was quite hard to read, but also compelling so hard to put down.

And finally, we have the story of Zaleekhah in 2018 London. She is a hydrologist, and she has just separated from her husband, and is moving into a canal boat moored on the Thames. She has very little furniture, is still trying to recover from her marriage, and she is searching for something more. Zaleekhah's parents were tragically killed when she was a young child, and she has been raised by her rich uncle and aunt. She knows that she owes them a lot, and she also knows that by the choices she is currently making, she is causing them disappointment.

I found Zaleekhah's story to be the least interesting of the three, but it was her story that really pulled two of the threads together at the end of the book, in quite a shocking way.

Obviously, there is a lot of focus on water in this novel, from the Thames to the Euphrates and Tigris. It seems timely as there are plenty of water related issues around the world, from lack of water in drought stricken parts of the world, to more regular flooding. 

This was one of the first books I read on my new Kindle Scribe and I wrote so many notes and highlighted so many passages. This was not only because I could, but because the way that Shafak puts a sentence, a paragraph, a page, together is so fabulous. There are layers and layers of story.

 Sometimes, there might be something small that is there to delight the reader, and sometimes you might wonder why it is there. And then, much later in the book, the connection that pulls through different parts of the story becomes clearer. There are also some very interesting cameos, particularly in the historical part of the story.

I am sure you can tell I really liked this book. Is it as good as The Island of Missing Trees? Not quite, but it is still a book, and an author, that I would recommend whole-heartedly. Now I just need to find some time to read Elif Shafak's backlist.

I am sharing this review with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I host