This was an amazing intricately interwoven story - essentially three storyline strands across the 19th and 21st centuries that are anchored by the Tigris and Thames rivers. A single drop of water that dates back to olden times - to King Ashurbhanipal of Mesopotamia in the ancient city of Nineveh - connects them all forever. Elif Shafak’s books are always laden with meticulous research and I think she’s outdone herself in this one! I have made notes to go back to several references to do research - whether it’s history, the Yazidi people, literature. I enjoyed each storyline strand, my favorite was Narin and her grandmother. The one I was a bit skeptical about was the Arthur storyline. I questioned his career trajectory a bit, despite his photographic memory, but I still enjoyed it immensely and was blown away by the complex research required for Arthur’s life story. And it was a relief that Zaleekhah’s initial mental state eases and she finds purpose, notwithstanding the burden she carries. The book unfolds layer by layer through each storyline strand, so be warned that readers may get a bit impatient like I did - as I was trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together…and they definitely did. Overall, I very much enjoyed the book and Elif Shafak has done it again - given us another book laden with tough themes, complex issues, a bit of magical realism, and beautiful language which conveys so much. There’s so much to think about and ruminate long after the last page is turned, and that’s definitely the hallmark of a great read. I know I’ll be re-reading this book again and again to parse out yet more insights and connections and will be doing research on many of the references interspersed throughout the book. Because of all this and more, I highly recommend this book and gave it 5 stars. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

History and drama in multiple plot lines slowly merging and telling one greater story, Elif Shafak takes us on a journey through time as mysteries of the past affect the future.

This was sad and heartbreaking and beautiful and hopeful and I loved the water analogy and how everything, just like water, connects at the end before the cycle starts all over again.

The amount of research that’s gone into this book is impressive!

At times, I felt like I was just pushing through, waiting for things to connect and I feel like the characters could’ve benefited from a bit more depth BUT, I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience and will definitely recommend :D

This author is amazing. Her writing is so beautiful. She manages to make a drop of water seem profound. That is an incredible skill.

This book centers around water. There is the Tigris and the Thames. There is a water scientist. There is the son of a mudlark. There is a girl, part of a marginalized population, who is about to lose her home due to a dam project. And those are just the major players. The story is told across multiple timelines.

I was drawn right into this from the beginning. I highly recommend it. I would recommend anything by this author.

I don't think I even have a choice but to give the book five stars?

I mean the amount of research and thought put into this is almost unbelievable. I would believe it though if an expose revealed that it was actually a team of writers who came up with this after working nonstop for approximately five years straight only subsisting on Ramon noodles (or insert it's equivalent) and taking direction from the fever dreams of this author, which they had to translate from the ancient text scribbled onto ancient clay as described here. That's the depth of such a project and boy this book must have taken pure dedication to finish.

It's one of those books that I cannot even attempt to summarize because it won't make any sense at all. It simply just works. Was it an easy and jolly story? No. Did I die a little inside as I gave myself a pep talk each time I picked it up? Yes. I mean it felt part science textbook mixed with an epic, emotional tale filled with passion and devastating loss. What a combo. I had to work for every page, maybe every sentence, to appreciate it's meaning in the grander scale of this book. I loved every POV character and I will miss them. That all being said, the book as I've described here is not going to be for everyone.

I received an e-arc from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf Publishing for an early copy of There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

From the opening paragraphs to the Journey of a Drop of Water at the conclusion of this overarching and magnificent achievement, author Elif Shafak has succeeded in giving readers an unforgettable sense of times, places and characters united by events in ancient Nineveh that define their lives. At the center of the story is the creation of the poem Epic of Gilgamesh and its discovery among ancient ruins. Finding someone to decipher the writing will be paramount and once completed will be of great importance not only to the people of the Middle East but to all civilization.

Three main characters intertwine as each is affected by the drop of water that unites them: Arthur, born along the Thames River in the 1840s to a destitute mother, Narin a young Middle Eastern girl slowly going deaf whose family wish to take her to the Tigris River for baptism amidst growing ISIS violence and Zaleekhah who continues to be traumatized by the accidental drowning of her parents.

Author Elif Shafak has included history, politics, environment, family, disease and the desire to find and retain meaning in lives that seek truth and happiness.

When dealing with artifacts of the past, what is there ultimate resting place? Should they remain in the country of origin, even if the country is poor with little enticement for visitors? Should the items be on display in the great museums of the world, not native to the country but able to be seen by millions? Should the artifacts be sold to private collectors to generate revenue?

Readers of There Are Rivers in the Sky will be driven to read Shafak's earlier works due to her skill as an advocate for all cultures and the preservation of antiquities

Thank you #Knopf and #NetGalley for providing this #ARC Advance Reading Copy. Expected publication date is August 20, 2024 • 5 Stars

I am a huge fan of Elif Shafak’s novels, and have read most of what she has written. I think that this book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, is, hands-down, her best work to date. I don’t know how she can top herself after this, but I am anxiously awaiting.

This novel spans centuries, continents, and cultures, entwining three main characters through the themes of rivers, rain, and waterdrops. The narrative is set along the Tigris and the Thames rivers, with characters including an extraordinary child born in Victorian London, a Yazidi girl in 2014 Turkey, and a hydrologist in 2018 London. The book explores the interconnectedness of these characters and their relationship with the natural world, particularly the rivers that flow through their lives. The story is rich with historical and cultural references, weaving a tale that transcends time and space.

#ThereAreRiversInTheSky #ElifShafak #Bookstagram

I love elif Shafak’s writing but I found this novel jumped around just a little too much for me to follow.

I love Elif Shafak's writing and I was thrilled to be able to read an ARC of this book. This one was maybe. more ambitious than her past novels in terms of the multiple storylines from different timelines and places. I loved that about this. I loved the anticipation of waiting to see how the stories connect, and the hints of things that connected each of those characters. I love the way history and literature and the way groups of people were treated historically binds binds this novel together. This is a wonderful book.

Three protagonists linked by two rivers, the water cycle and a lost culture make for an intriguing yet complex narrative structure. Shafak challenges her readers to contemplate how water, a tiny but vital molecule, travels through time and space without regard for human endeavors. Along the way, she links water to larger issues like racism (class and ethnic cleansing), memory (lost ancient Middle Eastern artifacts and literature), and climate change (hidden and polluted urban rivers and the cultural impact of damming to contend with desertification).

King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums is a 19th century boy born into poverty beside a polluted Thames River. He is named by the people who made their living retrieving artifacts discarded into the river. This occupation foreshadows Arthur’s future because, not unlike the Dickens characters he resembles, he has “great expectations.” He is a brilliant introvert who rises from grinding poverty to discover a calling excavating and translating cuneiform tablet shards from the destroyed city if Nineveh. Recovering an ancient poem— “Epic of Gilgamesh”— becomes his fatal obsession. That text was lost when the Mesopotamian library of King Ashurbanipal was flooded.

The second story is about a Yazidi girl named Narin. In some respects, this is the opaquest of the three stories. The traditions, history, and homelands of this obscure Kurdish sect are central to this story, yet it leaves much detail out. It is understandable that this long book required some editing, but it is unfortunate to have to resort to Google to follow it. Simply put, Narin’s mother is dead, and her father is away a lot as a travelling musician. Her religious grandmother is her primary caregiver. Narin is suffering from progressive deafness and her grandmother is intent of getting her baptized on sacred ground. Dam building on the Tigris leads to the flooding of their homeland. This necessitates travel to a distant sacred site that is hostile to the Yazidi people. This results in unfortunate consequences for Narin and her family.

Zaleekhah is a young hydrological scientist renting a houseboat on the newly restored Thames. Suffering from depression because of the breakup of her marriage, she develops a romantic relationship with her female landlord, who is a tattoo artist working in cuneiform decorations. This coincidence seems to be a stretch to link the three stories. In another case of heavy-handed foreshadowing, one also learns that Zaleekhah’s parents died in an Egyptian flash flood. She was raised in luxury by a loving, but meddling uncle. Her niece requires a kidney transplant— reminiscent of Narin’s deafness—an event that leads to dire consequences for her relationship with her uncle.

Shafak merges these three plots in a satisfying, yet unsurprising conclusion. Notwithstanding a few places where she may have hammered the puzzle pieces to make the stories fit better, this is a well-researched and engaging piece of historical fiction filled with obscure facts and a cast of realistic, nuanced characters.

I have tried to read this book through for the past month. I can’t physically make myself read anymore of it. I’m 160 pages/30% through and I couldn’t tell you what this book is about. There is no plot or stakes. The only vague connections I have is that the rivers are maybe important? Every so often there were moments where I thought “oh nice, it’s finally picking up. Maybe this is the start of something!” And every time it led nowhere and meant nothing. I don’t even know how to write a review other than I’m relieved to have finally decided to dnf this.

This was a beautiful story about how we are all connected in our shared humanity. The story is woven together by the travels of a single drop of water throughout the water cycle over thousands of years, focusing on the people this drop of water touches over time. From an ancient king, to a British academic, to a girl and a woman in more modern times, the life stories of these people is told. While it is a work of fiction, I think fiction can tell us truths about the world. The heartbreak of what happened to the Yazidi people is something you don’t see often in fiction, and I think it is so important that people be made aware of it. This book was lovely, bittersweet, and showed how we all seek connection in our lives.

Water connects everyone and everything on Earth through time. Each of the three protagonists are connected by a single raindrop that travels through history and imbues the narratives with an omniscient commentator. Shafak does a masterful job of bringing together times and places with the common threads of The Epic of Gilgamesh, cholera, death and life by water, the history of the Yazidi (including the atrocities committed against them), ISIS’s reign of terror in Iraq, and grappling with the pillaging of antiquities. Through the shifting perspectives and times, she shows the way our understanding of various actions and events has evolved (or not) and how we choose (or have chosen for us) what we face in both history and current events. While the characters endure a lot of trauma, it is important for the reader to bear witness and learn about the real world events that the characters witness and experience. The book brings past to present and forces the reader to ask and answer hard questions. Additionally, the writing is so gorgeous, engulfing you like the water that runs throughout.

I very much enjoyed two previous Elif Shafak novels (10 MInutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and The Island of Missing Trees) so I was eager to read an ARC copy of her forthcoming novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, to be published in late August 2024.

While there are certainly positives, this latest novel doesn’t quite work for me as well as the others I have read. The writing is lovely and there are many beautiful passages, the setting and history of Mesopotamia is fascinating, and the story’s connection to water is unique and laudable. However, the story structure is rather clunky and serves to hold the reader at a distance throughout. Three main characters (in very different times/places) trade narration through the novel, which could work well but Shafak has chosen to use a round-robin approach to their narration, with short chapters. It is difficult to connect with the characters or their unique storylines with such choppy story segments. There is also just too much exposition, and the flow of the story suffers. The characters' backstories and the historical background feel like barriers, making the novel tedious to read. And that is really a shame. The story has such potential, but the structure gets in the way.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on August 20, 2024.

4.5. What an amazing story and journey, following a drop of water through the centuries, from biblical times, to the 1840s, to the present, starting in Mesopotamia, Nineveh, England, Turkey, and Iraq. I love historical fiction as I often learn about times in history or events that I don’t really know a lot about. That is definitely true of this novel. A very creative novel that follows the story of three characters, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums in the mid nineteenth century, in London; Narin, a Yazidi girl in Turkey and Iraq in 2014; and Zaleekah, a hyrdrologist in London in 2018 with middle eastern roots. The Tigris in Mesopotamia and the Thames tie these characters together to weave a beautiful, yet heartwrenching story of each of their individual journeys—poverty, starvation, ethnic cleansing, the plunder of middle eastern artifacts—with water as the backbone of all cultures and the impact on their lives and ultimately on the future of the world. The novel also touches on many historical moments, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the destruction of Nineveh, the centuries long struggles of the Yazidis, and climate change. It is hard to describe all the events and people in this novel as there are so many, but that is what I found most captivating, and in my view, Ms Shafak did it so well as not to be confusing. The characters are so well defined. Very well researched. .Ms. Shafak constructed a very engaging novel. Thank you to Netgalley for providing me an advance copy in exchange for a candid and honest review.

The author uses the Thames, the Tigris and a drop of water traveling through space and time to create a strong connection among the characters. The book opens with the destruction, by flood, of the library of King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, burying or washing away the greatest follow books and artifacts. Arthur was born into poverty in the time of Dickens, along the Thames as her mother was mud digging for scraps to sell. Narin, a ten-year old in 2014, has her Yazidi Baptism beside the Tigris thwarted by developers seeking to destroy the religious group. Zaleekah, a thirty something hydrologist, living on the Thames, orphaned and brought to London, never felt she belonged. Water itself becomes a character.

The other main connections are the culture of Mesopotamia, the appropriation of artifacts, the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the ethnic cleansing of a people. Arthur suffered starvation, poverty and abuse. Due to his brilliant memory and mind he got work sweeping out a publishing house where he read everything he could. Passing the British Museum he watched the delivery of massive lamassa statues. This began his love of anything Nineveh. He was the first to translate a cuneiform stone with a piece of the epic poem. Narin sat by her Yazidi grandmother and learned of her ancestors who served as diviners while in Turkey and then Iraq awaiting her baptism. Zaleekah’s friend, a tattooist, specialized in cuneiform.

Each person’s life story could stand on its own; but like the Epic, it needs to be handed down from generation to generation. There needs to be a remembering, unlike water that ebbs and flows without end. I learned a great deal and enjoyed the book, I was not as invested in Zaleekah and her story.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for this advance copy.

Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky follows a single raindrop in its course from its fall onto King Ashurbanipal’s beard in ancient Nineveh to 1840s London to present-day Iraq and London. The action flows between times and between the great rivers Tigris and Thames. Water fills the consciousness of the characters, from mudlarks on the Thames to Yazidi people forced to migrate from the Tigris to wealthy Iraqi transplants living along the Thames: the language is positively humid. And behind it all lies our oldest surviving poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh—collected in the library of Ashurbanipal, searched for by London scholars, collected again by antiquities collectors. Its tale of great human adventure, deep friendship, and deepest grief in the loss of a loved one still and always resonates. Shafak doesn’t retell the epic, but her characters live it.

This book grabbed me from its opening tale of Ashurbanipal’s contending love of his books and easy cruelty to his subjects. It’s often painful, especially as we see the cruelty continuing from Nineveh to London to Iraq to London again. But the water connects beauty and love as well, and the trip is worth the pain. There Are Rivers in the Sky left me grieving and rejoicing at once. You can’t ask for much more from a book.

Thank you, #Knopf, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
#ThereAreRiversintheSky #NetGalley

“Water remembers, it is humans who forget.”
Thank you NetGalley for the eARC!
This book was so interesting! It follows three different characters in completely different places. We have King Arthur, Narin, and Zaleekah. They’re all connected, because of course they are, but in the most surprising way! Of all things, it’s water that connects these three characters. Water remembers, after all.
I won’t spoil more of the plot!! This book was beautifully written truly lyrical and poetic, I adored the writing style and I thought the multiple plots were handled very well. It’s easy to get lost with multiple characters, but the author did a great job of balancing them without making the reader confused or letting urge characters blend together. The story itself is beautiful and intriguing.
I really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it!

"There Are Rivers in the Sky" reads like an E.L. Doctorow novel. The author puts fictional characters alongside historical figures.

First up is Ashurbanipal, King of Mesopotamia in the 640s BCE. His favorite work in his library is a poem he knows by heart, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Then comes Arthur Smyth, amended from George Smith, who first translated the Epic from tablets held at the British Museum in the 1870s.

Two modern day women round out the story. Narin is a 9-year old member of the persecuted Yazidi religion. Zaleekhah is an hydrologist who lives in London but traces her roots to Mesopotamia.

All feel the pull of water.

Elif Shafak has written another beautiful engrossing novel. I loved the characters the story a novel I will not forget and will be recommending.@netgalley @knopf