Livre

Two longtime friends take you beyond the ground- breaking podcast with an expanded conversation and never-before-seen speeches, archival material, and original lyrics.

"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. "This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime." Polly Samson. "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 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.

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives - all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, an ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies, hidden in the sand, fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black River Thames. Arthur's only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur's world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book sending him across the seas : "Nineveh and Its Remains". In Turkey in 2014, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptized with water brought from the holy Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people. In London in 2018, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning, until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.

Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, sometime petty thief. He is a smooth-talker with an eye for a good game. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So, when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on Mahmood, he isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served. And at home his three little boys are waiting for him, as is Laura, fierce and full of love, ready to forgive his misbehaviour in a heartbeat if he can just straighten up his act. It is only in the run-up to the trial, as the prospect of freedom dwindles, that it dawns on Mahmood that he is in a terrifying fight for his life — against conspiracy, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. And, under the shadow of the hangman's noose, he begins to realize that the truth may not be enough to save him.