Rave
Ellis Ni Dhuibhne,
The Irish Times (IRE)
This is a wonderful novel. Normally one keeps this comment for the last line of the review, but I am so enthusiastic about The Island of Missing Trees that I want to put my cards on the table straightaway.
Rave
Ron Charles,
The Washington Post
American readers unfamiliar with the tumultuous history of Cyprus will appreciate how gracefully Shafak folds in details about the violence that swept across the island nation in the second half of the 20th century. But this is not a novel about the cataclysms that reshape nations; it’s about how those disasters recast ordinary lives.
Rave
Susie Boyt,
Financial Times (UK)
... a strong and enthralling work; its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways.
Positive
Spencer Quong,
The New York Times Book Review
... with its complex structure — the setting jumps from contemporary London to Cyprus in 1974 and the early 2000s, and many chapters are told from the perspective of a fig tree — Shafak’s novel conveys how our ancestors’ stories can reach us obliquely, unconsciously.
Rave
Jana Siciliano,
Bookreporter
Shafak has penned another masterpiece.
Positive
Eileen Gonzalez,
Foreword
... a poignant novel about the power memory has to harm and to heal..
Rave
Dina Klarisse Dugar,
The Seattle Review of Books
Shafak’s voice is tender but piercing, laying out each character’s joy and hurt as the novel unravels and reweaves itself across generations, borders, and butterfly migrations..
Positive
Samantha Rajaram,
Washington Independent Review of Books
By weaving together the past and present, Shafak provides incisive reflection on the trauma, displacement, migration, and loss that ensued during the civil war—experiences shared by both the fig tree (brought from Cyprus to England by Defne and Kostas) and its owners. Loss suffuses the lives of all.
Positive
Freya Sachs,
BookPage
The novel shifts easily in time and space, but even more interesting is the way that it functions as a story of environment and species.
Rave
Lucy Atkins,
The Sunday Times (UK)
... a poignant follow-up: an exploration of traumatic separation, displacement and exile.
Rave
Leone Ross,
The Guardian (UK)
Given Shafak’s affinity for the natural world, with whole pages of soaring, rich detail about songbirds or butterflies, the occasional cliched sentence was a surprise.
Positive
Sezen Ünlüönen,
Harvard Review
Shafak draws on a rich array of sources in her latest novel. Not only does the story feature a prominent fig-tree narrator, who brings her own arboreal expertise into the story, but Shafak also uses the island as a focal point to weave together myth (Aphrodite is believed to have emerged from the water in Cyprus), politics (the UN Committee on Missing Persons’ work in Cyprus), zoology (the mass die-off of fruit bats in the island in the 1970s), and lepidopterology (Cyprus remains an important waypoint for the annual migration cycle of Painted Lady butterflies). Though rich in historical anecdotes, interesting trivia, and local color—Cypriot delicacies, Turkish proverbs, and Greek terms of endearment abound—the novel is most significant as a piece of historical recovery.
Positive
Ann Skea,
The Newton Review of Books
Shafak tells a story that brings its rich and troubled history vividly to life.
Mixed
Olivia Ho,
The Straits Times (SING)
The novel, full of arborescent meanderings, grasps at ecological transcendence, exploring the effects that war has not just on humans but also the natural world. But it muddles this effort with its anthropomorphising of the fig tree, a narrator prone to rambling exposition, gossip and maudlin outbursts. Though it harps on the incompatibility of arboreal time and human time, it is sentimentally anthropocentric in its outlook. If there is one thing Shafak unfailingly excels at, it is scene-setting. Her portrait of Cyprus seems to spring off the page in all its fresh beauty.
Pan
Alev Adil,
The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
... the arboreal narrator gives the author the chance to talk about ecological devastation, including the mass death of bats and slaughter of songbirds, as well as the migration of butterflies and eradication of malaria on the island. Though these are important themes, the tree explores them somewhat awkwardly, in a voice that veers between a didactic drone...and an overblown florid lyricism.
Positive
Allan Massie,
The Scotsman (UK)
... this politically-so-correct novel is also good, often moving, intelligent and beautifully written. One may even set a prejudice against talking trees aside when one realizes that Shafak rather neatly employs her fig tree to impart necessary information about the historical background to her story.
Positive
Claire Messud,
Harpers
Shafak...writes in English in a lyrical, magical realist mode that somewhat leavens her story’s darkness.
Rave
Donna Seaman,
Booklist
... imaginative, provocative, witty, and profound.
Rave
Kirkus
Ambitious, thought-provoking, and poignant..
Rave
Publishers Weekly
Booker-shortlisted Shafak...amazes with this resonant story.