British Turkish writer Elif Shafak has published 19 books, writing in both Turkish and English. 10 minutos y 38 segundos en este extraño mundo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize, and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year; The Forty Rules of Love was selected by the BBC for a place on its “100 Novels that Shaped Our World” canon. In The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel (Bloomsbury Publishing) two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a local taverna. It’s there, beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers, and creeping honeysuckle, that Kostas and Defne cultivate their forbidden love with a fig tree bearing witness. The tree is there when war breaks out and the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns, a botanist looking for native species and his lost love. Years later, a Ficus carica, or fig tree, grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. It’s her only connection to an island she has never visited – and her only connection to her family’s history as she seeks to untangle years of secrets. David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue, called it a “wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times.”
