Every tree has its fruit. From the apple tree with its ancient temptations, enough to throw us out of paradise, to the common fig tree with its uncommon fruits loaded with symbolism between the erotic and the sacred, depending on how you look at it and, above all, depending on who is looking at it…
A story in which Elif shafak knows how to contribute much more than that intrahistorical point of view that shifts the focus from historical events to experiences. Because for Elif Shafak it is not about narrating the derivatives, consequences and paths taken by some characters depending on the circumstances. For her and especially for her protagonists, the question is to pull the thread that links everything in a subtle, invaluable embroidery. She almost invisibly conforms the seams of existence, of the questions thrown into the future that are the children and the echoes of the past as any final answer.
From the author of the Booker Prize finalist and with more than 300.000 readers worldwide, comes "a beautiful and harrowing novel focused on the dark secrets of civil wars and the evils of extremism" (Margaret Atwood)
In a convulsive 1974, while the Turkish army occupies the north of Cyprus, Kostas, a Christian Greek, and Defne, a Muslim Turk, meet secretly under the blackened beams of the Happy Fig Tree tavern, where strings of garlic, onions and and peppers. There, far from the heat of the war, a fig tree grows through a cavity in the ceiling, a witness to the love of the two young people, but also to their misunderstandings, the outbreak of the conflict, the destruction of Nicosia and the tragic separation of the two lovers.
Decades later, in North London, Ada Kazantzakis has just lost her mother. At sixteen, she has never visited the island where her parents were born and she is desperate to unravel years of secrets, division and silence. The only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a Ficus carica that grows in the garden of her house. The Island of the Lost Tree is a magical story about belonging and identity, love and pain, and the amazing capacity for renewal through memory.
You can now buy the novel «The island of the perdido”, by Elif Shafak, here:
