This is a hard book to pin down. It’s part historical novel, part call to action for the survival of Earth’s rivers and waterways. It’s definitely a saga, incorporating several timelines and character arcs. There’s a little bit of magical realism, a dollop of science, plus social commentary, poetry and philosophy. It took me a few chapters to fully engage with it, but once I did I was hooked.

It begins in ancient Mesopotamia in the fabled city of Nenevah, with an educated and cultured, but ruthlessly cruel ruler, who is entranced by the legendary poem The Epic of Gilgamesh. As a single raindrop from an approaching storm falls into his hair, he commands that his former mentor and teacher be put to an agonising death for supposed treason against him. The raindrop ascends into the sky where it will bide its time, ‘waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’ (p18)

These are the themes that are woven into the book’s several storylines; they dance around each other before coming together in its final pages: the essential nature of water to Earth and those who live here; the power of story, of poetry and language; the choices that humans make in our time on the planet.

There is Arthur, a boy born into poverty and mud on the banks of the Thames in 1840, who goes on to encounter the ancient clay tablets of Mesopotamia held in the British Museum and learns to decipher their strange cuneiform writing, stumbling across segments of the Gilgamesh poem as he does so.

There is Narin, a child of the Yazidi sect living alongside the ancient Tigris River in 2014, who travels with her Grandmother to visit their spiritual homeland, only to be plunged into persecution and war.

And there is Zaleekhah, a young woman who moves into a houseboat on the Thames in London in 2018, nursing a broken heart from a failed marriage, along with old hurts from a childhood tragedy. She is a hydrologist, studying the health and behaviour of rivers around the world.

What these three disparate people have in common is the centrality of water to their fates. Rivers, and two in particular – the Tigris and the Thames – feature throughout the novel. The lifestyles, customs, religious beliefs, legends and languages of those who have lived alongside these rivers across thousands of years, are referenced, giving a fascinating insight into topics that I had not known much about previously. This is done through stories – the lives and actions of three in particular, along with a wide cast of secondary characters.

There is some gorgeous writing throughout and so many notable passages that I had a great deal of trouble choosing just one to quote. Here is a beautiful metaphor that, I think, draws together some of the themes of this novel:

Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them…
We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, ‘Remember us.’

There are Rivers in the Sky p456

There are Rivers in the Sky was written by British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak and published in 2024 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.