This is a story about good people who go through terrible things. I loved the aunt who speaks in platitudes. Ada is angry and Kostas goes through his life avoiding conflict and not always fighting for what matters, not always seeing what he should. I appreciated the detailed history I learned about Cyprus’ civil war, a conflict that still exists today. I loved that the story wasn’t always what I expected, and the characters were far from perfect. A tavern with the best food in town and a fig tree growing on the inside, reaching out through a hole in the roof, offers them a safe place to meet. In school one day, just before the winter holiday break, she starts screaming for no clear reason.Īs we learn about Ada, we jump back in time to when her father and mother, Kostas and Defne, are teenagers in Cyprus in 1974. As the Turkish and Greeks go from being neighbors to outright warfare, all interaction between the two sides is forbidden, and violence will erupt if Kostas and Defne are found together. Her father seems more obsessed with the fig tree in their backyard. She’s completely isolated, without friends at school or family, and she knows nothing of her family history. In London, 16-year-old Ada is struggling to deal with the death of her mother and grief of her father. But the writing was beautiful and the characters rich and complicated. It depicts three timelines rather than the usual one or two. It’s strange because a good part of the story is told from the point of view of a fig tree. This was a strange read but one I found compelling in many ways. Shafak is a well-known British and Turkish author. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. My first read of 2023 is Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, which is set in Cyprus in the mid-1970s and in the early 2000’s, and then London in the late 2010’s, focusing on the civil war in 1974 between the Muslim Turks and the Christian Greeks.

Our missing hearts a novel