There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Published by Knopf Publishing Group
Publication date: August 20, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Historical, Literary
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Elif Shafak is one of my favorite authors for the kind of writing that makes me marvel at its beauty while reeling at its impact. Whether it’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, about how long the brain works after death or The Island of Missing Trees, set in Cyprus, she embraces difficult topics and weaves them into incomparable stories. In her latest, There Are Rivers in the Sky one drop of rain make its way through history from 600 bce to now while touching the lives of three disparate characters.
The genesis of Rivers in the Sky is the library of an infamous king in Nineveh, one of the greatest kingdoms in ancient Mesopotamia. He’s amassed an extraordinary collection of 30,000 works, including The Epic of Gilgamesh—the world’s oldest recorded tale. Later, the kingdom is destroyed and the library lost. Once again, Shafak is expansive in her themes, but all are centered around Nineveh, even as they splinter into stories involving religion, terrorism, climate change, and art. Water, in its various forms is the throughline, from the first king to Arthur, an impoverished scholar in 1800s London; Narin, a 10-year-old Yazidi girl in Turkey in 2014, and finally, in 2018, Zaleekah, a troubled British scientist studying water conservation.
Arthur is born in abject poverty, but becomes an acclaimed translator of the Gilgamesh tablets, while Narin is facing the imminent loss of both her village and her hearing, and Zaleekah has become lost both in her personal and professional life. The stories of these three are different rivers flowing through the novel, their lives diverted by seemingly unmovable obstacles, their waters muddied by loss, but all driven on by an inner current. Shafak chronicles their journeys with care, rendering each with an exquisite grace.
Rating There Are Rivers was not easy as the very reason I’m giving it four stars is the same that could cause another reader to rate it three stars or less. Namely, that I was able to set it aside for long periods of time before picking it back up and continuing. The uneven pace alongside so much history made long reading sessions problematic. But the thread never broke in the time away and returning to the page immediately set me back in the characters’ lives. This, plus learning more about a time in world history that has been lost (literally and figuratively), made There Are Rivers in the Sky another reason Elif Shafak is a writer to treasure.
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*I received a free copy of this book from Knopf in exchange for an honest review.*
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