There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

First published 2024

Amazon

4.4(112,811)

A single drop of water links three lives across centuries. In ancient Nineveh, the destruction of Ashurbanipal’s library scatters the clay tablets preserving the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, Arthur Smyth is born beside the polluted Thames and uses his extraordinary memory to escape poverty, enter the printing trade and join the search for Mesopotamia’s lost literature.

In 2014, Narin, a Yazidi girl living beside the Tigris, prepares for baptism before violence forces her and her grandmother towards their community’s sacred valley. The novel moves among excavation, translation, environmental damage and displacement, treating water as archive and witness. Mesopotamia, Victorian London and the Late Ottoman Empire are assigned, while no modern Yazidi or ISIS-related context is invented.