Author
The Island of Missing Trees
The novel links a divided family to the divided island of Cyprus. Its principal human story follows Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, whose youthful relationship develops amid communal hostility and the violence surrounding Cyprus in 1974. A second timeline centers on their London-born daughter, Ada, who inherits the emotional consequences of a past her parents have largely concealed from her. Between these narratives stands a fig tree descended from one that grew through a Nicosia tavern where Kostas and Defne once met. Shafak uses the fig tree not simply as a symbol but as a speaking character and witness. Human history, family memory, migration, plant life and ecological damage are therefore narrated as interconnected rather than separate subjects. The chronology moves between Cyprus and London and between the 1970s and a later family present, gradually disclosing how political violence enters intimate relationships and persists through silence. The novel’s six…