Read in 2026 - 4: There Are Rivers in the Sky

There are rivers in the sky

Elif Shafak

My sister lent me this wonderful book she bought as a paperback last summer at our favourite The Little Ripon Bookshop.

The story spans thousands of years as we follow the journey of a single drop of water through the various stages of its eternal cycle, neatly listed at the end of the book, something I appreciated very much.

But this is not a fairytale where a drop of water speaks or shares its thoughts. Instead, the reader is introduced to the three main characters whose lives we then follow, and finally, all three interweave, even though one of them has long died before the other two were born.

There is Arthur, from a poor working-class family in Victorian London. Against all odds, he finds meaning in his life. Narin, a Yazidi girl who lives near the river Tigris, is nine years old when we first meet her in 2014. Four years later we are back in London and encounter Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has just left her marital home, facing divorce.

On the surface, these three have nothing in common. And yet they are all linked by that single drop of water. What Arthur discovers in the 1870s keeps cropping up in the lives of the girl and the woman. Nothing is ever entirely "lost", but everything is connected.

There are some horrible things happening; not fictitious drama, but real life events such as the 2014 massacre of Yazidi people in the Mosul area, and the subsequent enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women and girls. Still, the details of these scenes are not drawn out for gruesome entertainment - it is still a wonderful book, leaving the reader sad but also glad for having read it.

I am not going to say more about the story, because you may want to read it for yourself. There is a lot in the book about ancient Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing and the epic of Gilgamesh - some of it I already knew but not in such detail. Also, Yazidi culture and faith plays a role, and I had known very little about this before. The book made me read more about them, with wikipedia as my main source of information. Then there is of course all the information about water, and it is amazing how much we still don't know about this most vital of elements on our planet.

The author has put a great deal of research into this book, and she mentions her sources on the last few pages, making it easy for the reader to follow up with the various topics if so inclined.

Elif Shafak has so far written 13 novels and 8 works of non-fiction. My sister has at least one more of her books, and I want to read that, too; the writing is beautiful and the storytelling keeps you wanting to read on. Her website is here.