Join the Costa 2021 nominated, bestselling author for a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, memory and amnesia, destruction and renewal.

Elif Shafak is a storyteller alive to the possibilities of another world. Her imagination encompasses not only the drama of the human heart and the fragility of human relationships, but the most expansive questions of history and identity, of how we live and create, and whose pluralistic, humanitarian political convictions – bolstered by her training and teaching as a political scientist – have made her the nemesis of censors and strongmen.

Her new novel – already a Sunday Times top ten bestseller – transports us back to Cyprus in 1974: a divided nation on the eve of war…

Two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided land, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek and Christian, and Defne, who is Turkish and Muslim, can meet, in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chilli peppers and wild herbs. This is where one can find the best food in town, the best music, the best wine. But there is something else to the place: it makes one forget, even if for just a few hours, the world outside and its immoderate sorrows.

In the centre of the tavern, growing through a cavity in the roof, is a fig tree. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, their silent, surreptitious departures; and the tree will be there when the war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to rubble, when the teenagers vanish and break apart.

Don’t miss this chance to hear from ‘a unique and powerful voice in world literature’ (Ian McEwan).

Praise for Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees:

‘A brilliant novel — one that rings with Shafak’s characteristic compassion for the overlooked and the under-loved, for those whom history has exiled, excluded or separated. I know it will move many readers around the world, as it moved me’ – Robert Macfarlane

‘A wonderfully transporting and magical novel that is, at the same time, revelatory about recent history and the natural world and quietly profound’ – William Boyd

‘This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime’ – Polly Samson

‘A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. The Island of Missing Trees is balm for our bruised times’ – David Mitchell

‘An outstanding work of breathtaking beauty’ – Lemn Sissay

‘A writer of important, beautiful, painful, truthful novels’ – Marian Keyes