The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shifak

 Elif Shifak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist who has written 19 books, 12 of which are novels including the bestselling 'Forty Rules of Love'. She is the VP of the Royal Society of Literature. This book is set in Nicosia, the capital of the island which is the only divided city in the world - the North being partitioned into Turkish Cypriots and the South into Greek Cypriots. Shifak places her story such that we explore what happened to the island which once was a beautiful place and everyone lived together like islanders and how the partition tore the people, their culture, their trees, apart.

The novel begins in London where we meet Ada, the daughter of a Greek Cypriot Kostas Kazantzakis, who is dealing with the loss of her mother Dephne, a Turkish Cypriot. The fact that the two, Kostas and Dephne, fell in love in times when the island was being partitioned, being of opposite clans, was itself a thing of conflict. Ada is trying to cope with her mother's loss, her own immigrant status, and her father's withdrawn nature and her behavior shows up in strange ways in her school. That her father lovingly speaks to a fig plant he transported from Cyprus and is preserving it from the cold by burying it does not help her. It is only when her mother's sister Meryem, a feisty widow, drops in to meet them in London does Ada know the story of her parents, of the cafe called Happy Fig which was owned by two lovers, Yusuf and Yiogros, and how her parents love story blossomed in the Happy Fig until the partition of the island with a 110 mile long line by the British army. Her father fled to the the UK and later took his wife there and settled down but they never grow out of Cyprus. When Kostas first meets Dephne after a gap he finds her working with the Committee of Missing Persons and realises that she is assisting the project to find out the bodies of Yusuf and Yiogros which were never found! 

The story is about Ada and her father and aunt coming to terms with their heritage but the book is layered beautifully with the history of Cyprus, its beauty, the war, the partition and how it affected the plants, the food. More importantly the book draws attention to the report of the Committee of Missing Persons which was engaged in finding out where people who were killed in the war were buried so their bodies could be exhumed and given to their families for a decent burial. Elif Shifak narrates the story through the Fig Tree, a cutting of which Kostas takes to London as a memory of the days at Cyprus, Meryem and Ada and Kostas and Dephne. Her research into the life of plants, of trees, of mosquitoes, birds, incidents, anything related to Cyprus and the war make this book a work of love and nothing less than that. Beautifully structured, and very well written. Lyrical prose, powerful message, a deep dive into the unknown history of the island.

An excellent read. Thank you.