The Island of Missing Trees is undoubtedly the most beautiful, most lyrical book I’ve read recently. I previously enjoyed Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul but feel she outdid herself with this newest book. Shafak writes with imagination, originality, and a hefty dose of magical realism of the people and natural environment of Cyprus.
Cyprus has a turbulent history, governed in succession by Greece, Turkey, and Britain; finally, the UN moves in to help settle a long-running civil war. Besides providing a Romeo and Juliet-type love story, this novel gives a knowledgeable yet compassionate account of Cyprus’s tragic past, looking in depth at its inhabitants and communities, fractured by war, partition, and religion.
The narrative switches from the late 2010s to the past 1970s, the setting shifts from London to Cyprus, and the narration moves between Ada, her father, and a fig tree. First the reader meets Ada, a sixteen-year-old girl of Cypriot origins, raised almost entirely without knowledge of her family or its past. After the death of her mother only months before, Ada struggles to hold herself together. Ada’s father, Kostas (a Christian Greek), and mother, Defne (a Turkish Muslim), fell in love, but due to the disapproval of both their families, they keep their relationship a secret. The couple is torn apart when Kostas is sent to England at the height of the civil war. Years later, after his wife’s death, he retreats into his studies of ecology and trees.
This book is powerful, moving, and profound without being stuffy. Though I was moved to tears several times (and at the end felt like I needed a good, cleansing cry), Shafak never resorts to sentimentality as she writes of the depths of war and loss—and the epigenetic changes those traumas evoke. Shafak masterfully connects our human lives with those of the natural world, particularly trees.
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The Island of Missing Trees is available through:
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