The Island of Missing Trees

Elif Shafak's 2021 novel moves between two islands of memory. In 2010s London, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis is grieving her mother and estranged from a Cypriot heritage she has never been allowed to know. In 1970s Cyprus, her parents-to-be, Kostas and Defne — he Greek Christian, she Turkish Muslim — fall in love in secret, meeting at a tavern called The Happy Fig as their island slides toward war and partition.

Woven through both timelines is a third, unexpected narrator: a fig tree, carried as a cutting from Cyprus to a London garden, which watches over the family and remembers everything the humans cannot bear to say. Through its eyes, Shafak braids together buried history, ecological wonder, and the long aftershocks of a divided homeland.

Tender and elegiac, The Island of Missing Trees is a novel about inherited silence and inherited love — about how the traumas of one generation take root in the next, and about the fragile work of belonging to a place, a family, and a past. A Reese's Book Club pick and Costa Award finalist, it is among Shafak's most beloved books.