An intergenerational story about family, war, loss, and love. In 1974 Cyprus, a Christian Greek boy and a Muslim Turkish girl fall in love despite it being forbidden. In 2010s London we learn how the past affected the family today…and every other chapter is narrated by the fig tree that saw everything happen. Shafak said her reason for making a tree a character and giving the tree an actual voice is that she wanted a character who stood outside of time, who was there before the humans and would be there after. Literary fiction is often weird and creative and can be all the more powerful for it.

The award winning British-Turkish novelist Shafak delivers an ambitious and gorgeous novel revolving around three fascinating individuals, the Tigris and Thames rivers, and the ancient poem The Epic of Gilgamesh. The sweeping narrative begins in King Ashurbanipal's Mesopotamian court and ends in modern-day London, with the central thread revolving around the life of a boy known as King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, from his birth by the Thames in 1840 to his death by the Tigris in 1876. The memorable characters, separated as they are by time and space, may not at first seem to have much in common, but they are connected by something small, crucial, eternal: a single drop of water.