- Published: 5 August 2021
- ISBN: 9780241988732
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 368
The Island of Missing Trees
Reese's Pick
- Published: 5 August 2021
- ISBN: 9780241988732
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 368
[Elif Shafak] joins writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Aamer Hussein, Andrea Levy, Hanan al-Shakyh and Leila Aboulela, who offer us fictional glimpses of London's Others
The Independent
One of the best writers in the world today
Hanif Kureishi
An intimate, affecting memoir . . . Her passion for literature is contagious
Colleen Mondor on Black Milk
A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. The Island of Missing Trees is balm for our bruised times
David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue
The Island of Missing Trees, for all its uses of enchantment, is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately
FT
The Island of Missing Trees is a magical masterpiece . . . Elif Shafak has done it again with this brilliant novel of the secrets of hearts, the history of Cyprus and the beauty of memory. Truly full of miracles.
Kate Williams
Poignant . . . [Shafak] knows exactly when to dangle unanswered questions, when to drench our senses, when to offer meaningful musings, elegant metaphors and tugs at the heartstrings
Sunday Times
Compassionate and enchanting, it's a transporting tale of roots, renewal and talking trees
Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction
Enchanting . . . Shafak's writing is poised and expressive, remarkable for its charm and lyricism . . . The novel is a tapestry of heavy emotions, but it's one that's spun with brightness
Sunday Telegraph, Novel of the Week
The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss
Good Housekeeping, 'this month's 10 books to read right now' (September)
The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work: its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world . . . for all its uses of enchantment, it is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately
FT
A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory
Literary Review
The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss
Good Houskeeping, best books to read this month
This is a sweeping, romantic tale about love and loss that's so evocative you can smell honeysuckle and figs wafting from the pages
Red, best books to read this autumn
The wounds inflicted and the search for healing across three generations is explored in the tales of its unforgettable characters . . . beyond the narrative, the author's longing to dissolve barriers between people and the natural world is evident. A beautiful read
Woman & Home, September Book Club Pick
If Ms Shafak's subjects are sombre, her magical-realist style is anything but . . . Shafak does not shrink from the reality of violence, but she salvages tenderness - even joy - form the wreckage of 20th century history
Economist
The Island of Missing Trees asks us important questions about losing home, about coping and secrets . . . this is a beautiful novel . . . made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy
Guardian, Book of the Day
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
Publishers Weekly
A magical story about nature, humanity and love . . . a beautiful contemplation of some of life's biggest questions about identity, history and meaning
Time, Anticipated Book for Fall 2021
A beautiful novel about the broken island of Cyprus and its wounded and scarred inhabitants, The Island of Missing Trees teaches us that brokenness can only be healed by love.
Bernhard Schlink
A book to be cherished and savoured
Naomi Klein
A brilliant novel -- one that rings with Shafak's characteristic compassion for the overlooked and the under-loved, for those whom history has exiled, excluded or separated. I know it will move many readers around the world, as it moved me
Robert Macfarlane
A kind of paean to the beauty and diversity of Cyprus...this is a colourful and impassioned work, original in the ways it retells and reconstructs painful pasts
The i
A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES is balm for our bruised times
David Mitchell
A wonderfully transporting and magical novel that is, at the same time, revelatory about recent history and the natural world and quietly profound
William Boyd
A writer of important, beautiful, painful, truthful novels. I LOVED The Island of Missing Trees, about the singular agony of civil war, about displaced people & unexpectedly the hope that can survive
Marian Keyes
An epic tale about love, grief and memory set in Cyprus and London between 1974 and the late 2010s
Spectator
An outstanding work of breathtaking beauty. I have been transfixed & transformed by a transcendent storyteller.
Lemn Sissay
At once intimate in tone and ambitious in its reach, The Island of Missing Trees is a novel that moves with the urgency of a mystery as it uncovers the story of lovers divided first by war and then, after they are reunited and have a child, by that same war's enduring psychic wounds. But there is tenderness and humor in this tale, too, and the intense readerly pleasures of a narrative that dances from the insights of ecological science to Greek myth and finally to their surprising merger in what might be called-natural magic
Siri Hustvedt
Lovely heartbreaker of a novel centered on dark secrets of civil wars & evils of extremism: Cyprus, star-crossed lovers, killed beloveds, damaged kids. Uprootings. (One narrator is a fig tree!)
Margaret Atwood on Twitter
Narrated in part by a wise fig tree, Shafak explores love, grief, war and transgenerational trauma in an elegiac and powerfully rendered novel
Observer
Shafak evocatively tells the couple's 40-year love story through a fast-paced narrative that moves between the past and present...the book explores the lasting impact the war had on Cyprus and the natural world - the displacement, the disappearances and destruction - while also revealing the tender efforts of the island to heal and regrow
New Statesman
This is a beautiful book that will entrance your imagination and capture your soul
Kate Williams
This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime. Though rooted in bloody atrocity it sings to all the senses
Polly Samson