Sweeping across centuries, and stretching from Mesopotamia to London, this is a new novel by Elif Shafak that conjures a trio of characters living in the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems "The Epic of Gilgamesh" of all time.
Engaging and melancholy ... Fascinating rabbit holes ... Shafak’s language often takes on the cadence of a fable, a poetic rhythm that can vary between beauty and a tendency to hold the reader’s hand ... With gorgeous writing throughout and many particularly stunning paragraphs that you’ll want to mark up and return to, these are the moments when There Are Rivers in the Sky explodes into a roaring journey through ecology and memory ... When the puzzle pieces fit into place, and the fates of the present-day characters collide, the final twist is both contrived and genuinely moving.
The risk with multiple overlapping narratives is that the reader can become more invested in one. The pace of the longer descriptive passages is slower than the character-driven sections, but no less forceful or imaginative ... This novel moves between continents, centuries, cultures and communities with intelligence and ease. Shafak raises big ideas around artefacts and ownership of cultural heritage and handles them with care ... A tribute to the power of language.
Her fiction merges history and topicality, near and far, into a single stream. It blends saga and romance with a strain of lyrical idealism that celebrates the mingling and doubling of cultures and identities ... A novel that can on occasion edge towards a default tone of benign sententiousness ... Melds science, scholarship and myth, domestic drama and moralised history ... A hybrid entity.
