Title: There Are Rivers in the Sky
Author: Shafak, Elif
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 446
Date Read: 01 December 2025
Bookshelves: read, favorites
My Rating (out of 5): ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
It was around this time last year I discovered that Shafak had published another title. I was understandably excited as I knew I had something to look forward to in the next year. To be clear, Shafak is my favourite author alive; a title the author has earned through the quality, style and variety of her works. So, when I picked up Shafak’s latest title halfway into the year as life began asking me difficult questions, it was with a mix of expectation, enthusiasm and the promise of a badly-needed escape.
In this book, Shafak writes about water. How it forms, how it cycles, how it shapes, how it defines, and how it remembers. She tells the story of three very different individuals, separated by time and geography and attempted to use water and words to reconcile their worlds. Arthur, born by the River Thames in 19th century London. Narin, born by the River Tigris around where used to be Mesopotamia, and Zaleekhah, who continues to have an academic relationship with water against all sensible odds.
Through the story, Shafak explores the characters’ unique relationship with the substance. We see how Arthur uses his talents to decipher a poem written in a forgotten tongue. And how this gift of memory shaped his relationship with both the River Thames and the River Tigris. We follow Narin, a little girl whose lived experience has been coloured by discrimination, but tempered by her grandmother’s love and their proximity to the Tigris. We explore Zaleekhah’s interesting decision to return to a life on the Thames in spite of the magnitude of destruction water was responsible for in her life.
The story develops slowly, as the reader follows these very separate characters like a twig in a tide, fleshing out the characters’ motivations, educating the reader about the history of several forgotten cities. The author simply asks that you trust her to bring the story into a meaningful confluence. This, she did in a very wholesome way. Elif Shafak really knows how to tell a story.
I appreciate that Shafak understands time and how to work her way through it. I need to spotlight this because time is notoriously hard to get right and I have seen even the best authors struggle with accommodating the past and the present in their works. How the past peeks the present, how the present yearns for the past, Shafak handles the complex interactions of time with remarkable grace. She has walked this tight rope in many of her other works. But the echoes of time in this book were far more nuanced, and the author pulled this off with total mastery. Brilliant!
This book had enough material to be fleshed out into 3 separate but probably less-interesting books. So, i applaud Shafak’s decision to condense these stories into one, albeit, slightly longer book.
Away from the Tigris and the Thames, Shafak suggests that water tells a story of all the places it has been. The water you cooked with today was probably used by a forgotten civilization for the same purposes 5000 years ago and has cycled through the atmosphere many times over, holding important history across the journey to the sky and back. I am deeply fascinated by the concept that water has some sort of memory, that water remembers. I continue to hope in silence that science someday confirms what many already know to be true.
A solid 5 stars! Read this book, folks!