Elif Shafak Press Reviews
The Island of Missing Trees is a magical masterpiece . . . Elif Shafak has done it again with this brilliant novel of the secrets of hearts, the history of Cyprus and the beauty of memory. Truly full of miracles. -- Kate Williams The Island of Missing Trees, for all its uses of enchantment, is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately - FT
Poignant . . . [Shafak] knows exactly when to dangle unanswered questions, when to drench our senses, when to offer meaningful musings, elegant metaphors and tugs at the heartstrings - Sunday Times
Compassionate and enchanting, it's a transporting tale of roots, renewal and talking trees - Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction
Enchanting . . . Shafak's writing is poised and expressive, remarkable for its charm and lyricism . . . The novel is a tapestry of heavy emotions, but it's one that's spun with brightness - Sunday Telegraph, Novel of the Week
The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss - Good Housekeeping, 'this month's 10 books to read right now' (September)
The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work: its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world . . . for all its uses of enchantment, it is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately - FT
A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory - Literary Review
The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss - Good Houskeeping, best books to read this month
This is a sweeping, romantic tale about love and loss that's so evocative you can smell honeysuckle and figs wafting from the pages - Red, best books to read this autumn
The wounds inflicted and the search for healing across three generations is explored in the tales of its unforgettable characters . . . beyond the narrative, the author's longing to dissolve barriers between people and the natural world is evident. A beautiful read - Woman & Home, September Book Club Pick
If Ms Shafak's subjects are sombre, her magical-realist style is anything but . . . Shafak does not shrink from the reality of violence, but she salvages tenderness - even joy - form the wreckage of 20th century history - Economist
The Island of Missing Trees asks us important questions about losing home, about coping and secrets . . . this is a beautiful novel . . . made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy - Guardian, Book of the Day
Booker-shortlisted Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World) amazes with this resonant story of the generational trauma of the Cypriot Civil War - Publishers Weekly
A magical story about nature, humanity and love . . . a beautiful contemplation of some of life's biggest questions about identity, history and meaning - Time, Anticipated Book for Fall 2021
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
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 writer of important, beautiful, painful, truthful novels. I LOVED The Island of Missing Trees, about the singular agony of civil war, about displaced people & unexpectedly the hope that can survive -- Marian Keyes
At once intimate in tone and ambitious in its reach, The Island of Missing Trees is a novel that moves with the urgency of a mystery as it uncovers the story of lovers divided first by war and then, after they are reunited and have a child, by that same war's enduring psychic wounds. But there is tenderness and humor in this tale, too, and the intense readerly pleasures of a narrative that dances from the insights of ecological science to Greek myth and finally to their surprising merger in what might be called-natural magic -- Siri Hustvedt
This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime. Though rooted in bloody atrocity it sings to all the senses -- 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
Lovely heartbreaker of a novel centered on dark secrets of civil wars & evils of extremism: Cyprus, star-crossed lovers, killed beloveds, damaged kids. Uprootings. (One narrator is a fig tree!) -- Margaret Atwood on Twitter One of the best writers in the world today - Hanif Kureishi
A beautiful novel about the broken island of Cyprus and its wounded and scarred inhabitants, The Island of Missing Trees teaches us that brokenness can only be healed by love. -- Bernhard Schlink
This is a beautiful book that will entrance your imagination and capture your soul -- Kate Williams
An outstanding work of breathtaking beauty. I have been transfixed & transformed by a transcendent storyteller. -- Lemn Sissay
A book to be cherished and savoured -- Naomi Klein
Shafak evocatively tells the couple's 40-year love story through a fast-paced narrative that moves between the past and present...the book explores the lasting impact the war had on Cyprus and the natural world - the displacement, the disappearances and destruction - while also revealing the tender efforts of the island to heal and regrow - New Statesman
A kind of paean to the beauty and diversity of Cyprus...this is a colourful and impassioned work, original in the ways it retells and reconstructs painful pasts - The i
Narrated in part by a wise fig tree, Shafak explores love, grief, war and transgenerational trauma in an elegiac and powerfully rendered novel - Observer
An epic tale about love, grief and memory set in Cyprus and London between 1974 and the late 2010s - Spectator
