The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Ada is 16 years old and struggling to fit in. She’s lost her mother, Defne, and she can’t connect with her father, Kostas. He’s physically present but emotionally distant. One day at her school in North London, Ada snaps, screaming uncontrollably. In response, Ada’s father invites her maternal aunt, Meryem, to visit from Cyprus. To Ada, Meryem holds the key to understanding her parents’ secret past and the legacy of trauma that Defne and Kostas brought with them from Cyprus to London.
Flashback to 1974: two teenagers are falling in love. Kostas is Greek and Christian; Defne is Turkish and Muslim. If the wrong people – including their families – find out, their very lives could be in danger. They find refuge at a local tavern, underneath the shade of a fig tree that grows through a hole in the roof of the building. The safety they feel, however, is illusory. War breaks out and the island is divided in two.
The Island of Missing Trees is a story about trauma, how it lives in bodies and is passed down through generations. The novel is written in Elif Shafak’s signature lyrical style – she writes about atrocities in something closer to poetry than prose. Shafak is prone at times to sentimentality – I couldn’t quite connect with the sentient fig tree – but it also feels cynical to criticise her methods of working through such a sensitive topic. This is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful work about what divides us and what brings us together.
