There Are Rivers In The Sky

Beskrivelse

Elif Shafak’s novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, weaves a captivating tale across centuries and continents. It follows three unforgettable characters connected by rivers, ancient poetry, and the enduring power of memory.

A sweeping story of love, loss, and connection tied together by rivers and a forgotten epic.

From the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, this novel journeys between the 19th century and the present day. Set along the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris, it explores themes of love, memory, healing, and erasure through the lives of three remarkable individuals.

In the ancient ruins of Nineveh, fragments of the long-lost Epic of Gilgamesh lie buried beneath the sand. Meanwhile, in Victorian London, a boy named Arthur is born near the grimy Thames. His extraordinary memory offers a chance to escape poverty, leading him to an apprenticeship at a printing press and eventually to a life-changing book about Nineveh.

Fast forward to 2014 in Turkey, where Narin, a Yazidi girl by the River Tigris, awaits a baptism with sacred water from Lalish in Iraq. When the ceremony is violently disrupted, she and her grandmother embark on a perilous journey across war-torn lands toward their people’s holy valley.

Then in 2018 London, Zaleekhah, a hydrologist nursing a broken heart, moves onto a houseboat on the Thames to find solace. She expects a life emptied of meaning-until a surprising link to her homeland shifts everything.

Elif Shafak delivers a masterful narrative that spans time and place, bound by rivers, rain, and drops of water that carry memory. As the novel reminds us, “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

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