Magical Realism — The Book Roads

The Island of Missing Trees

Elif Shafak

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.

Cyprus 2021