There Are Rivers in the Sky
A Novel
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Amazon's Best Books of 2024 o NPR's Books We Love
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives--all connected by a single drop of water.
In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, hidden in the sand, lie the fragments of a long-forgotten poem: the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur's only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur's world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptized with water brought from the holy city of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
In 2018 London, brokenhearted Zaleekhah moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning--until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time, Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains and waterdrops. It asks who gets to control memory. And it tells a powerful story about the cost of forgetting.
About this Author
ELIF SHAFAK is an award-winning British-Turkish author of a dozen novels, including The Island of Missing Trees, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Her work has been translated into fifty-six languages. She holds a PhD in political science and has taught at universities in Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom. She lives in London and is an honorary fellow at Oxford University.
Reviews
One of NPR's 2024 Books We Love
"With gorgeous writing throughout and many particularly stunning paragraphs that you'll want to mark up and return to . . . There Are Rivers in the Sky explodes into a roaring journey through ecology and memory." --The New York Times Book Review
"An absorbing novel. Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device." --The Guardian (UK)
"A brilliant, unforgettable novel, which raises big ideas of 'who owns the past' with nuance and complexity. Elif Shafak ties together diverse time periods and places in a way that seems both natural and wonderfully unexpected." --Mary Beard, author of SPQR
"An odyssey, an epic, a lament, and a tale of redemption, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a clarion call to honor the elemental forces that shape our memories, our histories, and our world. In short, a masterpiece." --Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
"From its bravura opening through to its final pages, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a dazzling achievement. Shafak's imagination is a wonder: bold, capacious, beautiful and wise." --Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
"Elif Shafak's beautiful and moving new novel bears the reader along on its marvelous currents. Here, rivers twine with other rivers and lives with other lives across centuries and cultures, as the fate of a single drop of water weaves an intricate tapestry of love and loss." --Robert MacFarlane, author of Underland
"Elif Shafak raises critical questions about one's connection to and responsibility for the past in this highly readable and engrossing novel." --Library Journal, *starred review
"There Are Rivers in the Sky is an enchanting epic, told through the vantage of single raindrop, where the sacred mysteries of water, science, and poetry collide. In this gorgeous and riverine novel, water is poetry, water is memory. This is a love song to the keepers of our stories and histories, a resounding tribute to the wise women who know the poetry of our rivers. Elif Shafak is one of them--a master storyteller whose prose thrums with such gorgeous details and propulsive spirit, flowing with a keen-eyed wisdom that only she could conjure. I came away feeling restored." --Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
"Intricate, exhilarating storytelling that is a poetic reminder of how connected we are to one another and to the past." --Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
"Elif Shafak approaches the world with grace, lyricism, and courage. Confronting societies riven by conflicts over gender, religion, sexuality, nationalism, memory, ideology, and more, Shafak wields the novel's artistic power to cut through complacency and orthodoxy with ruthlessness and beauty. Her words and works--compelling and provocative--leave us in a space of light, a clearing from where we can see this world anew." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
"Literature on a grand scale, mythic and timeless." --Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men
"A great, sweeping, enthralling novel - Elif Shafak's narrative vision is as remarkable and astonishing as ever. Wonderful." --William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart
"Elif Shafak is a unique and powerful voice in world literature." --Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
"Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won't regret it." --Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
"A book that is astonishing, ingenious and beautiful. A modern classic. Elif Shafak is one of the great writers of our time." --Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed
"Walt Whitman said that a blade of grass contains the journey work of stars. William Blake wrote that we can see the world in a grain of sand. Toni Morrison said that we never shape the world, but the world shapes us. And so Shafak finds the world in a drop of water. She discovers the epic in the tiny, the global in the local, the love in the loss, the history in the momentary. An extraordinary novel, fresh and cleansing, like the rain bouncing off the metal roof of our lives." --Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Aperignon
"Flows like rivers from ancient Nineveh to present-day London with characters of the distant past as bright and vivid as those of today." --Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl
"Gloriously expansive and intellectually rich . . . a magnificent achievement" --The Spectator (UK)
"Richly evocative. A fascinating stream of storytelling." --Financial Times (UK)
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