Ask a Bookseller: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak 

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

We finish up our Books of Hope series with a sweeping novel that interconnects lives across time through a single drop of water. The book is “There Are Rivers in the Sky” by award-winning British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak.  

Meghan Hayden of River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury and West Hartford, Conn., says she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it: 

“It just captivates you from the very start as a raindrop falls on the head of an ancient king of Mesopotamia, and he’s contemplating his vast library. And there’s a particular poem that he has on a blue tablet that is the prize possession in his gigantic library.

And we follow this poem, which is lost to time. We follow this raindrop through other characters, as we move from Victorian England to modern-day Syria and Iran, back to modern-day London. It’s vast and sweeping, but also incredibly intimate. 

The themes of this book are really around the politics of water, water scarcity, how water is both a life giver and an incredibly destructive force, and how we are all intimately connected by water.

You’ll learn a ton about how rivers and oceans work, how water circles the globe, but all in very personal stories of people’s lives who are revolving around two mighty rivers, the River Thames and the River Tigris. 

It really leaves you on a very hopeful note for our own future, as we are reminded that we are all so deeply connected. At this moment, we have an opportunity to look back at our shared history and avoid living some of the same difficult stories over and over.

I felt really inspired by the end of this book.”

— Meghan Hayden