After reading Shafak’s most recent novel, There are Rivers in the Sky, several people had mentioned this earlier book as her best. I did like it better, perhaps because the scope was more manageable–not requiring coincidence to bring the storylines together. What Shafak does impressively well is build a fictional story around historical events with numerous factual details bringing to light a trauma lived by many but known by few in the outside world. 

In this book it is 1974 Cyprus and its civil war that tore apart this Mediterranean island of Greeks and Turks, who once intermingled, and has now had a dividing line–a UN monitored green zone–for over 50 years. Muslim Turk Cypriots on the north side and Christian Greek Cypriots on the south side. Over 5,000 died and over 200,000 were displaced, some leaving homes in the south to move north and some leaving the north to settle in the south. Essentially they all became refugees, starting over in an unfamiliar place with hatred and violence hanging in the air. 

In this mess we meet two teenage lovers, Kostas and Defne, in 1974 defying their families, their religion, and their cultures to be together. But when war breaks out, their relationship breaks with it. Kostas is forced to leave. 

A second storyline shows Kostas and his daughter Ada living in London in the late 2010s. Defne died a year earlier, and Ada tries to make sense of her mom’s death while knowing little of her parents’ past. 

The third storyline is kind of an omniscient narrator, a fig tree in Kosta’s back yard that grew from a cutting he took while visiting the island in the early 2000s. The tree knows everyone’s stories: it watched Kostas and Defne date, it witnessed the war and all its violence, it watches Ada grow up, and it comforts Kostas as a single father. 

Like Shafek’s recent book, parts are beautifully written, particularly the natural world–botany, ecology, tiny details of butterflies, songbirds, and bees. And parts feel clunky–often stilted dialogue and some lacking character development. But I always appreciate how much history, geography, and politics one can learn from a good story.