"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

"There Are Rivers in the Sky explodes into a roaring journey through ecology and memory… genuinely moving.”—The New York Times Book Review

"Think Cloud Atlas, but with a single drop of water connecting all the stories."—Parade Magazine

"Shafak weaves together a dazzling feat of storytelling that explores the pain of exile and the power of human resilience."—Oprah Daily

"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

"Elif Shafak 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

"A brilliant, unforgettable novel, which raises big ideas of 'who owns the past' with nuance and complexity…. both natural and wonderfully unexpected." —Mary Beard, author of SPQR

"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."—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

"Literature on a grand scale, mythic and timeless." —Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men

"There's an elegance to Shafak's storytelling that always draws me, but it is her grit and substance that held me to the last page. Wonderful." —Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

"Elif Shafak is a unique and powerful voice in world literature." —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement

"Wide-ranging, eloquent and lavishly detailed, There Are Rivers in the Sky expertly draws its various narratives to a powerful climax." —Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of Afterlives

"Elif Shafak's beautiful and moving new novel bears the reader along on its marvelous currents…. as the fate of a single drop of water weaves an intricate tapestry of love and loss."—Robert MacFarlane, author of Underland

"Gloriously expansive and intellectually rich.... a magnificent achievement."— The Spectator (UK)

"Spellbinding.... Like water itself, There Are Rivers in the Sky seeps into the cracks and crevasses of our humanity, unlocking a sense of wonder."— BookPage, starred review*

"A multi-layered marvel.... I turned the pages hungrily, carried by Shafak’s energetic prose.... As ever, Shafak did not disappoint."—Max Liu, I Paper

“This is a love song to the keepers of our stories and histories....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

"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

"Elif Shafak approaches the world with grace, lyricism, and courage…. 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

"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

★ 07/01/2024

In her new novel, Turkish-British Booker Prize finalist Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees) uses a single raindrop to link together four characters, a thousand years, and several countries. The raindrop first lands on the head of Ashurbanipal, the ruthless Assyrian king who owns the extensive library that includes the epic poem Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, the raindrop, now a snowflake, falls on Arthur, the son of an impoverished river scavenger. Arthur, who is based on real-life Assyriologist George Smith, eventually decodes the clay tablets containing Gilgamesh. In modern-day Turkey, the raindrop, collected as rainwater, spills on Narin, a young Yazidi girl who lives on the banks of the Tigris, where she contends with her gradual hearing loss and religious persecution. In the form of a teardrop, the raindrop then settles upon Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who recently left her husband and lives on a houseboat in contemporary London. Shafak connects these characters through their love of Gilgamesh, Assyrian culture, archeology, and rivers. VERDICT Drawing on historical events, Shafak vividly narrates the theft of artifacts, war, colonialism, environmental crises, and genocide. From her extensive research, she raises critical questions about one's connection to and responsibility for the past in this highly readable and engrossing novel.—Jacqueline Snider

2024-05-31
Three characters separated by geography and time are united by a single raindrop.

In her latest novel, Shafak presents readers with an ambitious, century-spanning saga that revolves around three distinct characters hailing from different parts of the world and different time periods. There’s Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has fled her marriage to live in a houseboat on the Thames in 2018; Narin, a young girl who lives along the Tigris in Turkey in 2014, where she is gradually going deaf; and Arthur, a brilliant young boy born into extreme poverty in mid-19th-century London. Zaleekhah, Narin, and Arthur are united by a literary device that often feels overly precious: a single raindrop that, through a repeated cycle of condensation, falling, freezing, and/or thawing, reappears throughout time to interact with or afflict each character. Shafak’s attempts to personify the raindrop, which is described as “small and terrified…not dar[ing] to move,” fall flat. As a whole, the novel is engaging, with a propulsive narrative and an appealing storytelling voice, but Shafak is overly reliant on certain stylistic mannerisms, such as long lists of descriptions or actions that, stacked one upon the other, quickly grow tiresome, as in this description of Victorian England: “Spent grain from breweries, pulp from paper mills, offal from slaughterhouses, shavings from tanneries, effluent from distilleries…and discharge from flush toilets…all empty into the Thames….” Worse is Shafak’s tendency to overwrite and to pursue a self-consciously baroque narrative style (lots ofbetwixts andwhilsts), which occasionally results in convoluted or overly intricate phrases. “Did not our readings of poetry leave unforgettable memories?” one character asks early on. Less, as it turns out, sometimes does count for more.

An engaging story is marred by an overblown narrative style.