Review by Booklist Review
An immigrant fig tree narrates key passages in British Turkish writer Shafak's latest imaginative, provocative, witty, and profound novel. We first meet the philosophical Ficus carica as she is being buried in a garden in England to protect her from the coming winter. This hibernation inspires her to reflect on her long, keenly observant life on the island of Cyprus as the arboreal guardian of a popular taverna named The Happy Fig in her honor. There she witnessed the forbidden love between two teenagers--Kostas, Greek and nature-enthralled, and brainy and Turkish Defne--and the civil war that so cruelly separated them. Decades later in England, Kostas, a prominent ecologist and botanist, is mourning forensic archaeologist Defne and trying to care for their skeptical 16-year-old daughter, Ada. Help and comic relief arrive with Ada's proverb-spouting aunt, Meryem. As the full, heartbreaking tale of Kostas and Defne flowers in flashbacks, Shafak, alternating between bracing matter-of-factness and glorious metaphorical descriptions, casts light on the atrocities of ethnic violence, the valor of those who search for and excavate mass graves, the inheritance of trauma, and the wonders of trees and nature's interconnectivity. With Defne focused on death, Kostas on life, Meryem on the supernatural, Ada on facts and reason, and the fig tree's wisdom, Shafak propagates an enthralling, historically revelatory, ecologically radiant, and emotionally lush tale of loss and renewal.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Booker-shortlisted Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World) amazes with this resonant story of the generational trauma of the Cypriot Civil War. Just before Christmas in the late 2010s, 16-year-old Ada Kazantzakis confounds her London classmates by screaming during class. Shortly after, Ada and her botanist father, Kostas, receive a visit from Meryem, an aunt she's never met, the older sister of her dead mother, Defne. Ada feels growing shame about the scream, and is surly toward the free-spirited Meryem, who spouts strange adages such as, "We're not going to search for a calf under an ox." Shafak then jumps back to 1974, when Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne had assignations in a taverna built around a living fig tree, which narrates part of the book and offers lessons on the human condition via anecdotes about insects and birds. Kostas's mother, meanwhile, prompted by her disapproval of the courtship and worried over growing violence, sends him to London. Defne and Kostas are later reacquainted in the early 2000s on Cyprus, where she works searching for bodies of the disappeared. The reunion uncovers delicate secrets while expertly giving a sense of the civil war's lingering damage, and by the end Ada's story reaches an unexpected and satisfying destination. Shafak's fans are in for a treat, and those new to her will be eager to discover her earlier work. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
On the divided island of Cyprus, Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne must hide their love by meeting secretly at a taverna that has a fig tree pushing its way through the damaged roof. Separated by the 1974 war but eventually reunited, they take a clipping from the tree to London, where it blossoms into a tree of its own in their garden--a symbol to their daughter, Ada, of the homeland she is trying to understand. From the Booker Prize short-listed British-Turkish author; with a 75,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Following the travails of one fictional family from late-20th-century Cyprus to present-day London, Shafak explores the physical, psychological, and moral cost of the long conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots on the island's citizens and their environment. Shafak, whose previous novels have ranged from realistic political and domestic drama to fanciful interpretations of Muslim spirituality and mysticism, here exhibits her passion for an endangered natural world that possesses wisdom the human world lacks. While the novel is framed around London high school student Ada's attempts to learn about her parents' past on Cyprus and what drove them to emigrate, much of the novel is narrated by a fig tree. The loquacious, well-traveled tree fills in parts of the plot unknown to the human protagonists and offers rambling treatises on Cyprian history, plants, and animals. Ada's father, evolutionary ecologist Kostas, has tended the fig tree lovingly in his London backyard since bringing a shoot with him to plant when he and his pregnant wife, Defne, left Cyprus more than 16 years ago. Back in the 1970s, Greek Orthodox Kosta and Turkish Muslim Defne had carried on an adolescent Romeo-and-Juliet romance until civil war separated them. When they reunited in the early 2000s, Defne left Cyprus with Kostas knowing her family would never forgive her. They didn't. That loss and guilt over deaths she may inadvertently have caused plague Defne for the rest of her life, so she and Kostas decide never to burden Ada with knowledge of that past. Now, a year after Defne's death, a still-grieving Ada erupts with anger at her parents' silence surrounding their earlier lives. Then Defne's long-estranged sister Meryam visits from Cyprus and truths emerge about the hardships, violence, betrayals, and impossible choices faced not only by Defne and Kostas, but all of Cyprus for generations. Ambitious, thought-provoking, and poignant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
