A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Winner of the 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction * Shortlisted for
the Women's Prize for Fiction
"A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and
home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times." --David Mitchell,
author of Utopia Avenue
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.
