The Island of Missing Trees

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK
Winner of the 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction * Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

＂A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times.＂ -David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She has published eighteen books, eleven of which are novels, and her work has been translated into fifty languages. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED global speaker. Shafak contributes to many major publications around the world and has been awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the 12 people ＂who will give you a much needed lift of the heart.＂