There are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Penguin | Viking

Gosh – this is a spectacular read! It’s a big, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures.  It’s ingenious, moving and tender.  It deals with complex, uncomfortable moral and ethical questions, is filled with myths, poetry and history as well as insights into the hero of the story: water.   One lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water… As Ruth Ozeki says, it’s a masterpiece!

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse, over the course of centuries, two rivers and bind together three lives – Arthur, Narin and Zaleekah

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames.  His only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is travelling with her grandmother – a water diviner – to a sacred valley for her baptism. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a dedicated scientist and hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

This is a dazzling story!  You’ll be enchanted by the way these three lives interlink, entwined by rivers, rains, and waterdrops: ‘Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’ 

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