There Are Rivers in the Sky

another banger by elif shafak.

shafak has a knack for writing lush, evocative, sweeping historical fiction and this book might be one of her best yet. she so seamlessly connects themes of water, history, ecology, identity and culture that it feels obvious. a singular drop of rain falls on the ancient king ashurbanipal, and that's all shafak needs to weave mesopotamia, victorian england, the takeover of Iraq by ISIS, and current water conservation efforts. she's that good.

the research in this novel is also scrupulous and expansive. i learnt so much about nineveh and the yazidis (who are still being persecuted today), but the book never felt preachy or encyclopedic, it's never too dense. instead it gently submerges you into its world and gives you just enough information to want more, which is exactly what you need from a novel like this. shafak approaches her character writing in a similar manner: letting you in so you deeply feel for and understand them, but from far enough away so as to maintain an air of mystery, and the desire to keep reading their story.

it's been a while since i read a book so thorough, yet delicately and meticulously woven. i don't know if this is my favourite shafak novel ('10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' made me cry like a baby), but it's definitely her most ambitious - and i would say she succeeded with flying colours.

Deeply moving, poetic, compelling, and heartbreaking. I have two deeply felt wishes after reading this: that more writing such as this should exist in this world, from Elif Shafak and others, and that humans should be infinitely better than we are, to one another and to our planet.

After the first few chapters I got disappointed. Too many themes and overly constructed. Flat characters. We learn little about the Gilgamesh epos and also little about the Jezidis. The water droplet theme is a trick to connect it all.

Rivers are fluid bridges – channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and ultimately, the living to the dead.

Water, and rivers in particular, dictate more of our lives than most people realize. Cities, especially those founded before the proliferation of the railroad, need water and are very often situated along rivers. Our highways and railways often parallel rivers, taking advantage of prehistoric pathways the water has carved over millennia. I've spent much of my life in and around rivers – in them, I find orientation in a disorienting world. I'm a river person, and as such, I'm aware that many of our rivers are under various threats. Pollution, impoundment (damming), and rising water temperatures threaten both the quantity and the usability of our planet's freshwater, as well as every organism that relies on that water for survival. Like us.

I don't particularly like thinking about these things.

There Are Rivers in the Sky gave me no choice. Elif Shafak's novel is so finely crafted that we are confronted with these unpleasant truths, but she makes us want to sit with them. Both elegant and compelling, There Are Rivers combines multiple storylines told over a couple thousand years, the common thread between them being a single drop of water. Maybe this sounds a bit twee (it did to me, at first) but Shafak masterfully weaves the stories with a sleight of hand. Plot developments feel organic, natural, never forced by the author's storyboarding. Much of the story also revolves around the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic poem whose origins around 2100 BC likely date it as the oldest written poem in the world. This has the effect of somehow grounding the novel, like giving it an ancient air of authority.

I found There Are Rivers in the Sky to be a nearly perfect novel. The prose is artistic but not overly florid. The plot moves but doesn't lean on cliffhangers or other devices to artificially hook the reader. The sentences, the story, and the characters do the work, and do it well.

A poem is a swallow in flight. You watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one.

Like poems, rivers may be experienced, they may be temporarily impounded, they may be fought over, but we can never catch them, and they belong to no one. Elif Shafak reminds us we'd do well to remember this.

4.5/5 stars

Whenever I think about this book, I find myself having trouble articulating what this book is about. It's about people, about history in Mesopotamia, about relationships, about the Yazidi people, about the visible and invisible connections between people, about love in its many forms -even ones that harm-, about surviving despite your circumstances and the deep scars that they cause, about prejudices and brutality, about the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it's about a single drop of water.

Elif Shafak is great at teaching me bits of Turkish history I hadn't heard much about. The more brutal and ugly parts of it. But she does so beautifully. My heart broke again and again reading this book, for the characters, for the story, for the people in history who actually lived it. It's also sadly a very apt time for a book involving a genocide, one that is not widely known.

If you're not familiar with Elif Shafak's writing, you're truly missing out. Her writing is always so beautiful and somehow very educational, it borders magical realism at times. She writes about strong characters and weaves a story like a tapestry, once finished, forcing you to take a step back to take in the full picture.

This is no different, a story spanning centuries, cultures and countries. There are three main characters across time. Only by reading will you see if and how they're connected.

This is not a book you will read in one sitting. You'll take your time with it, and it'll steep within you, until you're ready to dive back in.

I read this as a mixture of audiobook and ebook, and really enjoyed the narration as well.

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC!