There Are Rivers in the Sky: A novel

From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an
enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all
connected by a single drop of water. "Make place for Elif Shafak on your
bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won't regret
it."—Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize In the ancient city of Nineveh,
on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but
ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign.
From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would
infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840
London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With
an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance
of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a
spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far
beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and
Its Remains. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed
with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens,
her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But
with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral
lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. In 2018 London, the
newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames
to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had
made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book
about her homeland changes everything. A dazzling feat of storytelling, There
Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a
drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and
harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history,
transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.” Read more

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf (August 20, 2024)


• Language ‏ : ‎ English


• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages


• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593801717


• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 10


• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches


• Best Sellers Rank: #4,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #7 in Epic Poetry (Books) #23 in Cultural Heritage Fiction #490 in Literary Fiction (Books)


• #7 in Epic Poetry (Books)

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