Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 8th April 2025
Paperback, Large Print Edition
Published: 27th August 2024
Paperback
Published: 13th August 2024
Hardback
Published: 8th September 2024
There are Rivers in the Sky: From the bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees
By (Author) Elif Shafak
Penguin Books Ltd
Viking
13th August 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Historical fiction
Narrative theme: Interior life
Narrative theme: Identity / belonging
Narrative theme: Displacement, exile, migration
Narrative theme: Sense of place
Narrative theme: Journeys and voyages
813.6
Paperback
496
Width 155mm, Height 232mm, Spine 36mm
592g
The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. 'A storm is approaching Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. One of the clouds approaching the world's largest and wealthiest city, built on the banks of the river Tigris, is bigger and darker than the others-and more impatient. It floats suspended above a majestic building adorned with marble columns, pillared porticos and monumental statues. This is the North Palace, where the king resides in all his might and glory. The cloud casts a shadow over the imperial residence. For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles. Dangling from the edge of the cloud is a single drop of rain - no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously - small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth open down below like a lonely lotus flower. Remember that raindrop, inconsequential though it may be compared to the magnitude of the universe. Inside, it holds a miniature world, a story of its own...'
Elif Shafak is a unique and powerful voice in world literature -- Ian McEwan
Shafak makes a new home for us in words -- Colum McCann
A writer of important, beautiful, painful, truthful novels -- Marian Keyes
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into fifty-five languages. The author of nineteen books, twelve of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak's latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was a top ten Sunday Times bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women's Prize. Her previous novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell's Book of the Year. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Shafak was awarded the Halld r Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to 'the renewal of the art of storytelling.'