Elif Shafak’s new novel, “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” gleams like the water at the center of its story, with characters, language, and stellar bits of research that show how refreshing great literature can be.
The author begins in the ancient city of Nineveh, where a king has amassed a great library that crumbles with the end of his reign. From its ruins, archeologists discover clay tablets covered in mysterious writing and fragments of a long-forgotten poem — the Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablets’ journey — along with the rise, fall, and recreation of a single drop of water — serve as a backdrop for Shafak’s story.
That story takes us to Victorian London, where a boy born beside a sewage-filled river uses his brilliant memory to escape his tragic childhood. It takes us to Turkey in 2014, where a young girl journeys across war-torn territories in hopes of reaching the sacred land of her ancestors. And it takes us back to modern-day London, where a broken-hearted woman restarts her life in a houseboat on the Thames.
That’s a lot for an author to juggle. But in a dazzling feat of storytelling, Shafak weaves her characters together with a single raindrop that falls, freezes, evaporates and reappears across time.
“Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies,” she writes, “waiting to return to this troubled earth again and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
Shafak’s novel sent me down several internet rabbit holes to learn more about geography, science and politics. In the end, though, it’s her characters who shine.
