Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, is a story she has been wanting to write for a long time, she tells me from a book-lined room in her house in London.
It focuses on two lovers – Kostas and Defne – from different sides of the divide in 70s war-torn Cyprus, and flashes forward to the life of the couple’s teenage daughter in London in the late 2010s.
It is also, improbably but effectively, partly narrated by a fig tree. This device enabled the Turkish-British novelist to broach the subject of the Cypriot conflict.
“I couldn’t dare to write about it because it’s such an emotionally charged subject,” she says. “It was only when I found the voice of the fig tree that I felt free to rise above, a little bit, these conflicting nationalisms and tell the story.”
The tree in question is in a tavern in Cyprus frequented by Kostas, a Greek Christian, and Defne, a Turkish Muslim.
