A novel about belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. - (Baker & Taylor)

The fig tree in her parents’ garden, which unbeknownst to her bore witness to their secret meetings decades ago, is her only knowledge of a home she has never known as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world. 75,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Winner of the 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction * Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction

"A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times." -David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet.

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. - (McMillan Palgrave)

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist. She has published 19 books, 12 of which are novels, including her latest The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted for the Costa Award, RSL Ondaatje Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a bestselling author in many countries around the world and her work has been translated into 55 languages. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize and was Blackwell’s Book of the Year. The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by BBC among the 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK. She also holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. Shafak contributes to major publications around the world and she was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Recently, Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to 'the renewal of the art of storytelling’. www.elifshafak.com - (McMillan Palgrave)

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* An immigrant fig tree narrates key passages in British Turkish writer Shafak's latest imaginative, provocative, witty, and profound novel. We first meet the philosophical Ficus carica as she is being buried in a garden in England to protect her from the coming winter. This hibernation inspires her to reflect on her long, keenly observant life on the island of Cyprus as the arboreal guardian of a popular taverna named The Happy Fig in her honor. There she witnessed the forbidden love between two teenagers—Kostas, Greek and nature-enthralled, and brainy and Turkish Defne—and the civil war that so cruelly separated them. Decades later in England, Kostas, a prominent ecologist and botanist, is mourning forensic archaeologist Defne and trying to care for their skeptical 16-year-old daughter, Ada. Help and comic relief arrive with Ada's proverb-spouting aunt, Meryem. As the full, heartbreaking tale of Kostas and Defne flowers in flashbacks, Shafak, alternating between bracing matter-of-factness and glorious metaphorical descriptions, casts light on the atrocities of ethnic violence, the valor of those who search for and excavate mass graves, the inheritance of trauma, and the wonders of trees and nature's interconnectivity. With Defne focused on death, Kostas on life, Meryem on the supernatural, Ada on facts and reason, and the fig tree's wisdom, Shafak propagates an enthralling, historically revelatory, ecologically radiant, and emotionally lush tale of loss and renewal. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

On the divided island of Cyprus, Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne must hide their love by meeting secretly at a taverna that has a fig tree pushing its way through the damaged roof. Separated by the 1974 war but eventually reunited, they take a clipping from the tree to London, where it blossoms into a tree of its own in their garden—a symbol to their daughter, Ada, of the homeland she is trying to understand. From the Booker Prize short-listed British-Turkish author; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Booker-shortlisted Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World) amazes with this resonant story of the generational trauma of the Cypriot Civil War. Just before Christmas in the late 2010s, 16-year-old Ada Kazantzakis confounds her London classmates by screaming during class. Shortly after, Ada and her botanist father, Kostas, receive a visit from Meryem, an aunt she's never met, the older sister of her dead mother, Defne. Ada feels growing shame about the scream, and is surly toward the free-spirited Meryem, who spouts strange adages such as, "We're not going to search for a calf under an ox." Shafak then jumps back to 1974, when Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne had assignations in a taverna built around a living fig tree, which narrates part of the book and offers lessons on the human condition via anecdotes about insects and birds. Kostas's mother, meanwhile, prompted by her disapproval of the courtship and worried over growing violence, sends him to London. Defne and Kostas are later reacquainted in the early 2000s on Cyprus, where she works searching for bodies of the disappeared. The reunion uncovers delicate secrets while expertly giving a sense of the civil war's lingering damage, and by the end Ada's story reaches an unexpected and satisfying destination. Shafak's fans are in for a treat, and those new to her will be eager to discover her earlier work. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown Literary. (Nov.)