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Elif Şafak
Turkish writer
The Island of Missing Trees
Synopsis
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.
Genres
Characters
Kostas KazantzakisProtagonist
A Greek Cypriot botanist whose forbidden teenage love with Defne is torn apart by Cyprus's civil war, and who later regrows the fig tree in London.
DefneProtagonist
A Turkish Cypriot woman, Kostas's forbidden love and Ada's mother, who dies before the novel's present day.
Ada KazantzakisProtagonist
Kostas and Defne's teenage daughter, grieving her mother in London and cut off from her family's Cypriot past.
MeryemSupporting
Defne's superstitious older sister, who cuts off contact after Defne marries Kostas and later visits Ada in London.
The fig treeSupporting
A fig tree grown from a cutting carried from The Happy Fig in Nicosia to the family's London garden; narrates roughly half the novel.
British Book Award (2023)RSL Ondaatje Prize (2022)Women's Prize for Fiction (2022)
Frequently asked questions
Is the story based on real historical events?
The narrative is deeply rooted in the actual history of Cyprus, specifically the 1974 conflict and the subsequent partition of the island and its capital, Nicosia.
What is the significance of the fig tree narrator?
The fig tree serves as a witness to the human events of the story, offering a unique perspective that bridges the gap between the past in Cyprus and the present in London while highlighting themes of ecological consciousness and interconnectedness.