Imprint: Penguin
Published: 07/04/2022
ISBN: 9780241988725
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 129mm
Weight: 259g
RRP: £8.99
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2022
A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2021
A rich, magical novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - now a top ten Sunday Times bestseller
It is 1974 on the island of Cyprus. Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.
In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.
Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle years of secrets, separation and silence. The only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a Ficus Carica growing in the back garden of their home.
The Island of Missing Trees is a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature, and, finally, renewal.
'This book moved me to tears . . . in the best way. Powerful and poignant' Reese Witherspoon
'A brilliant novel -- one that rings with Shafak's characteristic compassion' Robert Macfarlane
'This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime' Polly Samson
Imprint: Penguin
Published: 07/04/2022
ISBN: 9780241988725
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 129mm
Weight: 259g
RRP: £8.99
An outstanding work of breathtaking beauty
A writer of important, beautiful, painful, truthful novels
Lovely heartbreaker of a novel centered on dark secrets of civil wars & evils of extremism: Cyprus, star-crossed lovers, killed beloveds, damaged kids
Elif Shafak is a unique and powerful voice in world literature
One of the best writers in the world today
A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. The Island of Missing Trees is balm for our bruised times
The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work: its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world . . . for all its uses of enchantment, it is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately
A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory
The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss
This is a sweeping, romantic tale about love and loss that's so evocative you can smell honeysuckle and figs wafting from the pages