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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Nov 2021, 368 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2023, 368 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Noshin Bokth
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A rich, magical new novel 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.
Island
Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that the many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either wanted never to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries.
Legends, perhaps.
But legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.
It has been many years since I fled that place on board a plane, inside a suitcase made of soft black leather, never to return. I have since adopted another land, England, where I have grown and thrived, but not a single day passes that I do not yearn to be back. Home. Motherland.
It must still be there where I left it, rising and sinking with the waves that break and foam upon its rugged coastline. At the crossroads of three continents– Europe, Africa, Asia—and the Levant, that vast and impenetrable region, vanished entirely from the maps of today.
A map is a two-dimensional representation ...
The choice to give voice to a fig tree provides a mystical element that is reminiscent of a fable. But her effortless prose truly makes the fig tree seem human, so the reader will often forget that the narrator is a tree. Through the tree's musings, we are inundated with the reality of the natural world. The Island of Missing Trees is far more than a prosaic love story. It is a tribute to ecosystems everywhere and their resilience in the face of utter devastation...continued
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(Reviewed by Noshin Bokth).
David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue
A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times. Robert McFarlane, author of Underland
Trees, here, grow through the lives of these unforgettable characters, becoming bearers of memory, makers of metaphor and witnesses to atrocity. Shafak has written a brilliant novel - one that rings with her characteristic compassion for the overlooked and the under-loved, for those whom history has exiled, excluded or separated. I know it will move many readers around the world, as it moved me.
In Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees, Kostas, one of the protagonists, can be described as having an intimate love affair with nature. The other characters, including Kostas's daughter, are often puzzled by his eccentric passion for the Earth and the creatures we share it with. Kostas grew up on the island of Cyprus, and he witnessed the growing tension between Greek and Turkish residents right before the 1974 civil war. Years of ethnic strife and colonialism have left indelible imprints upon the island. War evokes melancholy for human loss and suffering, yet we seldom consider and mourn the ecological devastation it inevitably causes. However, Kostas sees the Earth and its trees as inextricable to life. He gives the multitude of ...
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