Book Club: Monday, April 5, 2027, 2-4pm. Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only event

April 5, 2027,  2-4 pm – Fellows and External Fellows

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (2024)

Discussion Leader: Mary O’Connor

This beautifully written novel, with inventively interwoven narrative strands, begins in the ancient city of Ninevah on the Tigris River in 640 BCE. There it introduces us to a legendary library, the home of a tablet recording part of the epic story of Gilgamesh. The novel then moves to 1840s London on another river, the (stinking) Thames, and a poor (but gifted) boy who becomes obsessed with Ninevah and the Gilgamesh story. Later (like the actual Assyriologist George Smith), working at the British Museum, he travels to Ninevah to investigate the story’s ancient archaeological artifacts. The next part of the novel moves back geographically to the Tigris River but forward in time to 2014 where a 10-year-old Yazidi girl faces personal persecution and cultural loss as ISIS destroys her people’s ancestral lands, even as she struggles to learn and retain their ancient traditions. And then the action shifts to 2018. We are again in London, England but this time with Turkish-British Zaleekah, a newly divorced hydrologist studying climate issues, who moves into a houseboat on the River Thames.

We promise that we’ll provide you with a dramatis personae and a time/space-line for this long-ish but gripping novel. Take our word for it that this dazzling storytelling manages to intertwine the lives of these various “outsider” figures through the themes of memory, power and knowledge. It achieves this in part through a single image: that of water, specifically a drop of water, which re-appears across the centuries and cultures, showing how a drop that falls today as rain is the witness to everything from the rise and fall of ancient empires to the traumas of modern history (including environmental ones). This unifying motif also binds together the novel’s two structuring rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—that are repeatedly shown to be sources of both life and death. As Shafik puts it: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.” (Available in all formats; 464 pages)

The link to register is https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/wXmbvFTUQG

The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Mary Jane Ashley at maryjane.ashley@utoronto.ca.