A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory * Literary Review * The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work; its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways. Oh — and one of the narrators is a fig tree. This tree is wise (aren’t all tree narrators?) but can also be witty. The infamous fruit devoured in the garden of Eden was assuredly a fig, it maintains. Nice as they are — crisp, refreshing and wholesome — no one ever went overboard, in life, for an apple. One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination (16).

The Island of Missing Trees begins with an astonishing scream of some duration and ends with the dreams of a soon-to-be unburied fig tree. Proposing arboreal collaboration and reciprocity as exemplum for humanity , The Island of Missing Trees proposes an ethical value-system in which humans are urged to recognize the rights of nature. The tree records the threats to its own life, explaining that “a tree’s rings do not only reveal its age, but also the traumas it has endured, including wildfires, and thus, carved deep in each circle, is a near-death experience, an unhealed scar” (45). In this moment, the novel implies a broad ethical question: “Do trees have intrinsic rights?” (Jones and Cloke 220) and, if so, who grants them, and how do we defend them? The fig tree is shown to have self-knowledge, and makes meaning out of green, scarred matter; this, in turn, makes matter meaningful, both in and of itself as well as for humans. Emphasizing the intra-actions of matter and meaning, Karen Barad reminds us that “knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part” (185). For her, the rings of a tree reveal how matter has agency, engraining a tree’s history “within and as part of the world” (Barad 180). Shafak’s novel similarly shows the tree within and part of the world, creating those arborealities that I have been tracing that bring us from representing to knowing to valuing arboreal life, or an “ethico-onto-epistemology” (185) that recognizes the “differential intelligibility” (335) of more-than-human life. This is most evident where the tree outlines arboreal time through its rings:

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A wonderfully transporting and magical novel that is, at the same time, revelatory about recent history and the natural world and quietly profound’ William Boyd Ada’s favourite bedtime story from her mother featured soldiers during the second world war who feared for their lives when they saw a cloud of yellow poisonous gas floating towards them, only to realise it was thousands of migrating butterflies. This image of deathly threat dissolving into beauty is characteristic of Shafak’s magical sway.

Was London the obvious place to come? “Yes, it really was. I love this country. It’s so diverse, and I don’t take that for granted, because I come from a country that has never appreciated diversity. But I’ve also seen it change. Imagine it. I became a British citizen, and a few months later, Britain left the EU. I used to think British people were so calm when they talked about politics, but that calmness has gone. Brexit broke a strained system. There are many things that worry me, and one is that the language of politics is full of martial metaphors now. This talk of judges being the enemy of the people. It makes me freeze. These are dangerous signs. I’ve met some arrogant politicians. ‘Surely you’re not comparing the UK to Turkey,’ they say. No, I’m not saying that. But what has happened elsewhere can always happen here.” Rounded to 5/5. Recommended for readers who enjoy thought-provoking historical fiction that blends together love, loss, and the magic of the natural world. The story has two timelines, one set in 2010s London following 16-year old Ada Kazantzakis, and the other mainly in 1970s Cyprus, following Defne and Kostas, Ada's parents. A third narrative voice is a fig tree, who lived in the middle of a tavern in Cyprus, before a cutting was taken by Kostas and planted in his and Defne's English garden. Ada's story looks at her grief with the loss of her mother, and her exploration of her cultural history, through her aunt Meryem's visit. The past follows the Turkish Cypriot Defne and Greek Cypriot Kostas falling in love on a divided island. Kostas is sent to London to live with his uncle, whilst Defne is left behind, with a secret. Through it all, the fig tree watches, offering insight into the character's past, the natural world, and the history of Cyprus. ELIF SHAFAK: When I was in Michigan, Ann Arbor, the winters were so cold, and I remember meeting Italian American families who would bury their fig trees if the winters were particularly harsh. The tree is central to the novel’s exploration of the past’s uncanny incursion into the present in three interlinked ways. First, it is as an authorial medium, with Shafak herself commenting on how the idea of a narrating tree provided “a sense of freedom that I needed to dare tell the story” (qtd. in Nair) of a divided Cyprus. 2 The novel’s arboreal narrator focalizes this history, bearing witness to the “division of the island into a Greek South and a Turkish North” and the displacement of thirty percent of the population (Dietzel 2; 146). As one historian of the conflict observes, “all Cypriots have been haunted and branded […] by this protracted, never-ending confrontation,” characterized as it is by ethnonationalism on both sides (Anastasiou 10). Second, the tree is a memorial medium through which the novel negotiates the island’s history. The “missing” in the title connects deforestation and ecocide to the legacy of the disappeared on both sides of the island’s divide. Third, the tree is a more-than-human medium, or an imaginative leap into arboreal life that enacts an intraspecies communion with nature, which is accorded a subject status at the level of narrative and story. The revelation that we have a narrating tree comes early in the novel, in its second chapter, so that readers experience her as a companion to the opening narrative voice. As such, Kostas’ observation to his daughter—“We’re only just beginning to discover the language of trees” (Shafak 41)—has metafictional significance.As with the Ovidian intertext, the novel’s Shakespearean epigraph introduces an ecological history that is suggestive of stages in the human-nature relationship, where that relationship is not hierarchical, as in Genesis, and Judeo-Christian creation stories more generally, but instead recognizes the animacy of all living organisms. Todd Borlik notes that in contrast to biblical tradition, “Ovid’s universe is far more dynamic and fluid, in which every creature can mutate into something else” (30). If not mutation, movement is suggested through Macbeth and the witches’ prophecy of a marching forest. To Macbeth himself, it is not only conceivable but verifiable, and supported by the messenger’s conditional, ocular proof, “As I did stand my watch upon the hill, | I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought | The Wood began to move” (5.5.31–33). The play’s lively forest is, significantly, the consequence of felling, with Malcolm’s instruction, “Let every soldier hew him down a bough | And bear ’t before him” (5.4.4–5), announcing both a martial strategy, as the branches provide camouflage, and a deeper, extractive proto-capitalist logic: Malcolm and his men assume the right to take nature for their needs. An animist world is set in opposition to an Anthropocentric one. How do you tell your own stories? Does a story you share about your day over the dinner table or to a colleague during a break differ in style from a story you might tell on a long drive or a story you might write in your journal? Finding the Disappeared Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self intention and compassion – until we learn them not to. […] When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. […] If maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice (57).

The Island of Missing Trees, for all its uses of enchantment, is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately * FT * The story begins in the “late 2010s” with Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old north Londoner. Her mother, Defne, died 11 months earlier, leaving Ada and her father Kostas scalded by loss. Kostas grieves discreetly, consumed by misery in the garden at night, while Ada watches from an upper window. A magical story about nature, humanity and love . . . a beautiful contemplation of some of life's biggest questions about identity, history and meaning * Time, Anticipated Book for Fall 2021 * The Island of Missing Trees is a 2021 novel by Turkish writer Elif Shafak. Set in Cyprus and London, it follows a romantic relationship between a Greek and Turkish Cypriot. [1] [2] [3] It was released by Viking press in 2021. [1] Summary [ edit ] In this powerfully elegant novel, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak wades into the Mediterranean Sea to tell a story of coexistence run amok, botched by those who inhabit the Earth together. The Island of Missing Trees is a masterpiece of allegory illustrating how fanatic hatred and collective beliefs worldwide maintain a hold on present-day lives through ancestral memory—and result in othering.SHAFAK: I wanted an observer that lives longer than human beings, you know? Trees have this, you know, longevity. They were here before us, and they will most probably be here long after we humans have disappeared - but also to think more closely about issues like, what does it mean to be rooted, uprooted and rerooted? So if you're telling the story of immigrants, people have experienced displacement, either within the island or outside. Then to think this through roots and uprootedness was an important not only metaphor but an important emotional attachment for me. The push and pull of teenage emotion is also captured with precision. We see Ada’s thinking mature, experiencing her shifts in perception incrementally. Resisting the urge to simplify or judge is a recurring theme. INSKEEP: I want people to know that the narrator of this story, to the extent that there is one, is a fig tree, which speaks in the first person. Is this how you came to that, then? You wanted a neutral observer of it all? Between the scream, unleashed by the teenage heroine Ada during Mrs Wallcott’s history lesson, and the ceremonial rebirth of the fig, there are star-crossed lovers cauterised and separated by the violence of the 1974 civil war in Cyprus, investigations of multigenerational trauma and determined searches for the loved and lost. There are eccentric aunties who chat about the gods as though they were the neighbours (Aphrodite is pretty “but a bitch”), a teenage social media storm #doyouhearmenow, a lament for the cruel trade in songbirds and a self-help guide for adults seeking arboreal consolation.