Welcome to Litsy!

Starting honour on the sail into Dubrovnik 😍😍

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.

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.

Every once in a while you read the blurb of a book and think this could be a new favorite. Then you read the first paragraph and gets it confirmed. This was that book for me. I knew I was in safe hands and could just get lost in the story.

Arthur by the Thames from the 1840s, Narin by the Tigris in 2014 and Zaleekhah by the Thames in 2018. I preferred Arthur and Zaleekhah‘s stories and I post under a spoiler why

And that ending

Half the book is narrated by a sentient fig tree. This book isn't for everyone, but the poignant prose kept me hooked. 16-year-old Ada Kazantzakis in 2010s London, grappling with grief and cultural identity, and her parents, Defne and Kostas, navigating their forbidden love during the Turkish-Greek conflict in 1970s Cyprus.