There Are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak builds her novel around one drop of water and the way it returns across centuries. The story follows Arthur, a boy born into poverty on the banks of the Thames in 1840 who grows into a gifted scholar of ancient Mesopotamia. It follows Narin, a Yazidi girl in 2014 Turkey whose community faces destruction. And it follows Zaleekhah, a hydrologist living on a London houseboat in 2018. Their lives never quite touch, yet Shafak threads them together through rivers, memory, and the oldest surviving poem in the world. The result is a wide-reaching story about water, loss, and what survives when so much is washed away. Florence Welch chose it for her Between Two Books club.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about There Are Rivers in the Sky
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A single drop of water links three lives across time: a poor Victorian boy, a Yazidi girl in 2014 Turkey, and a London scientist, all tied to the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh.
The three characters, separated by more than a century, are linked by a single drop of water and by their connection to the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and the rivers of Mesopotamia.
Yes, in part. The novel draws on the real history of the Epic of Gilgamesh, 19th-century Assyriology, and the persecution of the Yazidi people, woven into a fictional story.
There Are Rivers in the Sky was written by Elif Shafak, published in 2024 by Viking.
There Are Rivers in the Sky is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, There Are Rivers in the Sky takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
There Are Rivers in the Sky is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.