The Island Of Missing Trees: The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is a richly layered novel that intertwines love, division, memory, and nature. Set in both Cyprus and London across three time‑periods — the 1970s in Cyprus, the early 2000s, and around 2010s — the story begins in 1974 when Greek‑Cypriot Kostas falls in love with Turkish‑Cypriot Defne amidst rising sectarian tension. They meet in a tavern called “The Happy Fig”, in which a fig tree grows through the roof and becomes a silent witness to their secret love, the subsequent war, and their separation. The narrative then shifts to London where their daughter Ada struggles with her identity and roots, while the fig tree — a cutting of the original tree — stands in their backyard as a symbolic link to home and history. The novel touches on themes such as identity and displacement, ecological consciousness, generational trauma, and the way pain and silence pass through families. Shafak uses the voice of a fig tree as a narrator to lend the natural world an active role in human history — “a tree is a memory keeper”.