There Are Rivers in the Sky

By: Elif Shafak

Published by Random House, 2025-07-01

<b>From the Booker Prize finalist, author of<i> The Island of Missing Trees</i>, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water. • "Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf [and] in your heart. You won't regret it."—Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize</b><br><br>In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the <i>Epic of Gilgamesh</i>, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. <br><br>In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: <i>Nineveh and Its Remains.</i><br><br>In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. <br><br>In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything. <br><br>A dazzling feat of storytelling, <i>There Are Rivers in the Sky</i> entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”