Welcome to Litsy!

Starting honour on the sail into Dubrovnik 😍😍

Mini book haul. My husband was playing an outdoor gig and there was a church yard sale going on next door, so I _had_ to go visit it, right?

A library book. I loved The Island of Missing Trees by this author so looking forward to this one.

Overall I enjoy the story, and I have to confess I didn't know anything about the Cyprus civil war and it was really interesting, I'm sure I'll look more into it. Despite loving magic realism and the way Shafak writes, I often found the parts told from the fig tree's point of view quite boring and I felt myself disconnecting and having to re-read them sometimes. I didn't mind the parts of the fig tree when they were relevant to the story, it was⬇️

As I get older I find I‘ve been wandering further from new or popular fiction and diving deep into translations and older literature as so much is relevant to our current age or forces me to look at the world through a new lens. This book, a novella combined with a collection of short stories, looks at the history and continued violence in a small mountain community in Turkey and how easy it is to be overlooked by the rest of the country.

#roll100 another absolutely beautiful novel from Elif Shafa - she has such a talent for description and drawing you into the lives of her characters. Heartbreaking that so much of this is based on true events.

Quite hard going and very convoluted descriptions. You can see how with a bit of refinement it could have been great. Don‘t pick it up for a comfort read 🙂

April #bookspin pick. Fingers crossed I get to it. I‘ve been looking forward to it for a while now.

Loved this story. Human connection through water. Told through 3 perspectives, set on the banks of the River Thames and the Tigris in 2014, 2018 and 1840 (and a bit beyond). My favorite character was King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. Not one I‘ll soon forget!