Elif Shafak

Türkiye

About

Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist and essayist whose work explores identity, memory, migration, feminism, and the connections between East and West. Her acclaimed novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and The Island of Missing Trees. Her writing often brings together multiple cultures, histories, and perspectives.

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The Island of Missing Trees

The Island of Missing Trees

A Greek Cypriot boy and a Turkish Cypriot girl fall in love in 1970s Cyprus, meeting secretly beneath a fig tree in a tavern as ethnic tensions threaten to tear their world apart. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada struggles with grief and a past her parents have never fully revealed. As family secrets emerge, a fig tree growing in their garden becomes a living connection to a homeland left behind. Narrated partly through the tree itself, this moving novel explores displacement, inherited trauma, forbidden love, and the fragile bonds between people, nature, and memory.

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