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The action opens in December, in a school in north London, where 16-year-old Ada (whose Turkish-Cypriot mother, Defne, died the previous January) is in a history lesson. Her teacher is gearing up to study migration and generational change. Everyone needs to interview an elderly relative, but Ada knows that her father, Kostas, a Greek-Cypriotbotanist, won’t talk about her family’s past. She finds herself screaming, and can’t stop: ‘Her voice was a flying carpet that lifted her up and carried her against her will.’
At home, her father is digging a trench to bury the fig tree — which turns out to be a cutting from a tree that watched over his emerging affair with Defne — to save it from what is poised to be a harsh British winter. People are stockpiling, ‘as if getting ready for a siege’: this is weather as war, the enemy as climate change — one of what verges on a checklist of themes as Shafak spins between Ada’s teenage angst and her parents’ complicated history.
From that guttural scream, a clip of which goes viral, to the question marks hanging over Defne’s mental health, Shafak packs in the issues at a dizzying pace. Immigration, colonialism, homophobia and ethnic division are all woven together. A lesser storyteller would struggle with so many different threads, but Shafak, who writes in English, is meticulous at plotting. Nothing happens without a reason, down to Ada doodling a butterfly in her teacher’s prescient history lesson. Butterflies feature heavily, alongside a host of other insects and animals, to underline how connected we are as species.
What doesn’t quite work is Shafak’s attempt to set up the story as a mystery about Ada’s origins and the relatives missing at Defne’s funeral: the clues are already in the prologue, where she spells out the price of living on a divided island. What lifts the novel are snippets such as the image of the occasional birthday balloon that escapes a child’s grip to drift into enemy territory across the border, or the thought of a new generation like Ada’s asking the right questions to heal rifts. Not forgetting that fig tree, reborn with fresh roots in a new country.
Because you read about cyprus
Also by Susie Mesure
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