The Island of Missing Trees

By Elif Shafak

For their first meeting in 2024 Book Group 1 read ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ By Elif Shafak. Leslie hosted the meeting at her home, there were 9 who attended.

In 1974, two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided Cyprus, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is the only place that Kostas, who is Greek, and Daphne, who is Turkish, can meet in secret, hidden beneath the leaves of a fig tree growing through the roof of the tavern. This tree will witness their hushed, happy meetings, and will be there when the war breaks out and the teenagers vanish.

Decades later in north London, sixteen-year-old Ada has never visited the Island where her parents were born. She seeks to untangle years of her family’s silence, but the only connection she has to the land of her ancestors is a fig tree growing in the back garden of their home.

The Island of Missing Trees is beautifully written in magical realist style.

Several issues, i.e. migration, the environment, transgenerational memory in humans, plants and animals, human conflicts, divided countries, etc. are brilliantly addressed in this beautiful novel.

Elif Shafek wonderfully succeeds in making us aware of how everything in this world is connected and that humans are only a small part of the environment but can contribute to its destruction by putting themselves at the centre of the universe.

All of us thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Island of Missing Trees’, declaring it one of the best books they had read recently.

Marianne Khor