Julia's Book Club – There Are Rivers in the Sky
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It's a story about intergenerational kind of knowledge and trauma, I think. You know, you see this sense for the lives of the Adizi women in the novel and we get this sort of horrific sense of history repeating itself, of the people who are constantly being dispossessed, constantly being discriminated against for their beliefs. I am thrilled to be joined again today by the fabulous Sarah Holland-Batt. Sarah, it's been a while since we've caught up. What have you been up to?

Lots of teaching, Julia. We've had a massive semester at work and then I've been teaching high school students in Victoria who are studying my poems for the Victorian curriculum. So that's been delightful and quite hilarious, getting lots of specific questions about 10-year-old poems, that sort of thing. And I'm also really excited. I'm looking forward to going to the UK really shortly on a book tour. So it's busy, busy, busy, but all good stuff. How about you?

Well, I'm in the UK now and let me just give you a weather warning. It's not that great. I'm returning to Australia fairly soon. I've got a big set of commitments there, but it's always great to be home. So I'm looking forward to getting to Adelaide, seeing my family, all of that. What have you been reading lately?

So I've been sort of slowly working my way through the Booker shortlist. At the moment, I'm reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which is a fantastic kind of spiky feminist spy espionage kind of novel that takes all of those tropes that we're familiar with and flips them on their head, seeing them from the perspective of a female spy. And it's so far, so far, so brilliant. Really loving it. How about you? What are you reading at the moment?

Well, I've got Creation Lake sitting on my to-read pile, but it's part of the exciting news about the Booker Prize, which is for the first time ever of the six books that made the shortlist, five are by women, and that's the largest number in the prize's 55-year history. And one of them's an Aussie, and you've read her book, haven't you? Yes.

I have the magnificent Charlotte Wood, who is just such a great writer and also just an excellent human being. So it's lovely. Often those things coincide and it's fantastic when you see someone who's just a good soul to lots of writers in Australia getting that recognition on the international stage. And her book is so beautiful. It sort of begins as this quiet meditation about a sort of woman who's working on species conservation who decides to abandon her husband, abandon her life,

and join a monastery but of course that's never so simple and all sorts of incursions and reminders of the real life come in and it's just magnificently written a beautiful book and I couldn't be happier to see an Australian author on that biggest of world stages it's just great.

It is just great. So Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood on the list. I've read Orbital, which is on the list by Samantha Harvey, which is a short book and it's the story of...

an international space crew so they are drawn from many nations and they are orbiting the earth and it very closely and wonderfully describes that sensation that you often hear astronauts talk about that when you can see the whole earth in front of you this sort of beautiful yet fragile globe uh

that things about nationality and race and difference, things that keep us apart just melt away because you can see the whole of it. And so it's an exploration of what that means in individual characters' minds, as well as just the rigours of being...

up there for so long hurtling through space and seeing, I think, at its six sunrises and six sunsets every 24 hours and all of that kind of thing. So a good read too. So plenty to keep us busy on the Booker list and Charlotte to be barracking for.

And there's some great books coming out in Australia too. One that I'm definitely going to snatch up as soon as it's available is Claire Wright's got one of her magnificent histories coming out. So she's written for us the Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom, and now she's going to tell us the incredible story of the Yucala Blacksmith.

bark petitions so the first time that there was a formal assertion of native title and now of course they hang in parliament house so plenty to be going on with on the reading list

But today we're on a different book than any on the Booker list. And this is the first time we've really done a double header. I interviewed for the podcast Alif Shafak, who is just a wonderful author. And today we're going to talk about her new novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky. So between the two episodes, people can listen to us talking about the book and listen to her talking about the book.

This is a story of three characters who at first glance seem to be from very different eras and very different places. It's the story of two rivers, the Thames and the Tigris, and one ancient poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

So three, two and one characters, rivers, poem. But it's also the story of one drop of water because it's the drop of water that connects these characters. So a leaf paints this beautiful picture of a single drop of water hurtling from the sky. It lands first on an ancient and cruel ruler of Mesopotamia. It goes back up into the sky and then it lands here

into the lives of the other three characters. How did you find the interweaving of the very different stories and that device of the drop of water to connect them?

Well, you know, it's a big task, isn't it? Weaving together those different timeframes and weaving together, I suppose, Victorian England, ancient Nineveh, Mesopotamia. Then we have kind of contemporary Iraq and we have contemporary London. All of these sort of metropolises of their times, really. You know, I found myself thinking a lot that it is about the connections between these characters, but it's also about the connections between

the city and the individual. You know, you have these sort of individuals who in some ways are shaping their own fate and in other ways are being shaped by the city, by the place they grow up in and by their circumstances. You know, we have some of these characters in poverty and others in power. And so I think...

Shafak finds interesting ways to kind of blend them together. We have this device of the raindrop that kind of unpredictably recurs through the novel, but we also have lots and lots of other connections as well. And one of the most interesting ones for me as a poet, you're not going to be surprised, is the recurrence of the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know, one of the great, great works of world literature. And this is sort of planted at the start. And then it comes into all of the characters' lives in also unpredictable ways. And

I found myself really delighted to find a contemporary novel obsessed with Gilgamesh. It sent me back to the poem and it sent me back to the kind of mystery of the poem because we don't have the full thing. We've only got sort of fragments of it and we see it, you know, from these fragmentary perspectives. So I think

I think it's a sort of unholy task to blend those timeframes together, but the novelist kind of finds lots of ways to make the stories touch on one another. What did you think about the way the stories kind of connected? I knew you'd go to the poem and I saw...

And I'm so glad you did. I didn't know anything about the epic of Gilgamesh before reading this book. So as a poet, you'd have far more expertise than me. But the weaving in of that, and it has taken me to the poem, there are many translations available. And this is truly an ancient poem.

and done differently as a story than many narratives we're used to. We're often used to heroic characters who have got all sorts of wonderful attributes, and yet this is the story of a deeply flawed person whose flaws show throughout, and then there is some form of redemption or reckoning at the end.

And one thing in Elif's novel, In Rivers in the Sky, is that she's playing with two different endings to the poem. So right from ancient days, she is putting that the original sign off of the poem by the scribe who's writing it down is now and always.

is praise be to Nishabah and Nishabah is a female goddess, the goddess of storytelling. Whereas the authorised and received version over the ages has at the end of it, praise be to Naboo, who is a male god.

And so that's a kind of delightful way of looking at it, I think, and getting us to question who gets to write, who is accredited with writing and how we receive their words.

Absolutely. And I mean, there's so the fascinating thing about Gilgamesh is how many versions of it there are, you know, it was written simultaneously in multiple languages. And, you know, ancient Babylon, that's where we get that Tower of Babel, you know, we get that idea of multiple languages all happening at once. And so there are many versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh floating around, and they're still digging it up. The most recent bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh

was dug up in 2018. So it's sort of a literary mystery that keeps getting pieced together. And I loved that the novel engaged with the mystery of that and the uncertainty of that. You know, I think with so many ancient texts, we like to believe that they're fixed and they have one form. And this novel in lots of ways asks us to look at

you know, the ways that histories are very contingent on fate, on who happens to be the one who writes them, on who gets their hand on the evidence, you know, who manages to get those tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh and what happens to them. You know, some of them come through the British Museum, others of them land in the hands of ISIS, you know, who've looted museums and then are flogging them off on the black market. And so, you know,

through the story of this really ancient poem, this poem that was written something like 3,000 years ago in a language that's been extinct for 2,000 years, we get a very contemporary history of lots of sort of geopolitical forces like looting, invasions, oppression. All these things are very live in this very, very old, fascinating poem.

And that takes us really to the first of the big three characters. So we do start in ancient Mesopotamia, but the first of the big three characters is Arthur, who's alive in the mid-1800s in London. He comes from an incredibly impoverished back

His people are the people who wade into the Thames, which was then a filthy, stinking sewer of a river. And what they're looking for is just the tiniest little things that you can scavenge and sell, things that people might have dropped or that richer people might have discarded that you can grab out of the river and at least make something from to keep yourself alive.

And yet he is a very talented boy who ultimately, and this is the story we get told, manages to find his way into the British Museum and he is there trying to decode these ancient tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh or at least the sections that are then in the museum.

And in describing all of that, we are presented by Alif the author with an examination of the role of museums. She says, and I quote,

No longer simply a warehouse, it is actively taking part in determining what is worth preserving for posterity. Within its walls, history is not only being protected and displayed, but also rewritten. Yet Arthur is too young to understand that in deciding what will be remembered, a museum, any museum, is also deciding in part what will be forgotten.

I mean, I think they're incredible words to get us to think about museums.

And then when we're introduced to the next big character, the next big character is a young Yazidi girl who's living in Turkey and whose story takes us through the violence of ISIS and the way in which they started a genocidal campaign against Yazidis and took women into sexual slavery camps.

and that the aftermath of all of that is still alive for us in contemporary times. And we hear from this young girl's grandmother from Narin and she says the following: "Westerners take our past, our memories, and then they say, 'Don't worry, you can come and see them anytime.' But how do we even get there? Those museums have millions of visitors from all over the world. Their doors are wide open.

Yes, but millions more cannot travel, can they? We're here, but our history is elsewhere. It's like they've severed our body into pieces and they say, whenever you want, you can come and visit your limbs.

It's really poignant, isn't it? And I think it's such a live question for museums everywhere at the moment. What do they do with these riches that have been taken from other cultures? But nonetheless, there are these objects that have cultural significance for cultures that

very, very far away from where they belong. And I also had noted down a line that I liked that said, you know, the Yazidi family who were driving to Iraq and contemplating the fact that the wonders of their parts of the world are held in museums overseas.

We're here, but our history is elsewhere. You know, this idea that history is sort of mobile in that way and that what remains is often oral history, not necessarily the artefacts, but the memories of the artefacts. And I think we see that in the Yazidi story. You know, there's not much proof.

of what of what knowledge what cultural knowledge rests with the Yazidi characters and so the knowledge is oral it's passed through generations and it's it's very very deep but it's a different form of commemorating and and keeping knowledge than than that in a museum but then I

I think the novel also asks important questions about, say, a vexed, vexed region like Iraq, which has suffered from so much looting, so many sort of horrific terrorist groups coming through and trashing antiquities,

And so many governments that haven't taken care with historic sites as well. You know, Shafak raises a couple of dams that, you know, have washed away historic sites of world significance. And I think there's a sort of complexity there where it's not a novel that's necessarily...

railing against what museums seek to do, but a novel that's asking some complex questions about how we grapple with that in the contemporary world where we have an understanding and a respect for those cultures that perhaps may not have been there when all of their objects were sort of taken wholesale. And I loved that Shafak

sort of picked up that question across multiple timeframes. You know, it sort of recurs in the contemporary, but we also see Arthur in Victorian England going to visit the Louvre on his way, you know, on his way to Constantinople and then on his way ultimately to the Nineveh site. And he's both...

amazed and marvelling at these antiquities, but also sort of slightly privately discomforted by the fact that they're all there in one kind of building, all sort of crammed in together. And we get the same thing with the beautiful, with the great exhibition, you know, all of these wonders of the world.

transplanted into one place, which is wonderful. But again, the question of who has access to that, she kind of continually raises, I think, in interesting ways, questions of class and access to culture.

And Arthur is a story of moving across class not comfortably. He is born in this horrible poverty through his intelligence and hard work, becomes a museum curator. He is absolutely entranced by the epic of Gilgamesh. He goes to search out the missing tablets.

He becomes a bit of a hero of this age, of this Victorian age in which the explorers went out and brought back these precious things to the UK. But ultimately, this complete...

steeping in the epic and the way it causes him to journey around the world brings a lot of heartache and stress and strain into his life. We don't want to do any spoiler alerts. So here is a very dramatic story, but a movement across class raising these issues. Naren is in far more contemporary times. Obviously, we have all lived through what happened in Iraq and

the Yazidi people. She is living in Turkey in 2014 when we're first introduced to her and her life at that point is filled with love but it has certainly deep pressures in it. So her mother is dead and

She is living with her grandmother. She is much loved by her grandmother. Her father loves her deeply too, but his job as a musician takes him away frequently because he's got to go and perform at weddings and things like that.

And she knows that she is going deaf, that she has a hearing issue that cannot be solved, will not be solved by hearing aids, that she is slowly losing her hearing. And she is desperate to hold on to the stories that her illiterate and innumerate grandmother tells her. Her grandmother can't write these stories down. And so with her going deaf, she knows she's just going to have to remember them.

But tragically, her family decides to travel to Iraq for her baptism at exactly the wrong time as ISIS is sweeping through.

and causing mass murder, the taking of captives, people to flee, many sought refuge on Mount Sinjar where there is no water and people died simply from hunger and thirst as well as from acts of incredible violence. What did you think about this story and how Alif Shafak handles it for us?

Well, I think first and foremost, it's a story about intergenerational kind of knowledge and trauma, I think. You know, you see this sense for the lives of the Adizi women in the novel and we get sort of glimpses to generations prior. There's a connection to a much, much earlier kind of female figure in the same family. We get the sort of horrific sense of history repeating itself, of people who are constantly being dispossessed

um constantly being discriminated against for their beliefs which are you know uncomfortable in the region unusual in the region a minority kind of group um and so the women of course bear bear the worst brunt of this you know the the men are killed relatively quickly the women suffer a very different and harrowing fate and i think um

you know, reading it, I was really mindful of all of the stories that we hear, you know, in the news of these women who are still in sexual slavery from these events that are now, for most people, a sort of distant memory, 2014, 2015, it's a while ago, but it's a daily reality. So I think Shafak handles that aspect of the storyline with great kind of sensitivity and

There's no sugarcoating what happens to the women and I think that's sort of important when you're dealing with

historical realities when you're talking particularly about women who have lived through this. I think the novel quite squarely kind of confronts the horror of that fate and the way in which women try to protect one another. You know, there's beautiful kinds of scenes between Besma, the grandmother, and Noreen of each of them in their own way trying to sort of extend their

some protection to one another in a situation where there really isn't any protection for women. But through these women, we see the sort of extraordinary power of this sort of matrilineal memory passing through them.

There's a beautiful line that Noreen's grandmother says to her, Besma says, the tree remembers what the axe forgets. This idea that these wounds are sort of carried through these generations long after the oppressors have forgotten the names and faces. So I think...

That storyline for me, it's a work of commemoration. And I think it's quite telling that she doesn't depart from reality in those sorts of sections. They feel very grounded. They feel very real. And I feel like she's trying to honour, I suppose, the experiences of real women in that region. Yeah, I found the narrative of it interesting.

but also it had, you know, propulsion in it. You wanted, you did want to turn the page and find out what was happening next and that was partly because you had invested in the characters, particularly the young girl, Noreen, you had invested in her. But, you know, you were invested in the story and I do think it takes

takes a particular care to present such horrible events, but to keep you reading because it is too easy. And I think this is a challenge for all of us in today's world that there are so many things that are so oppressive, so violent that we can get to the stage that we think we can't look any longer. We look away. Uh,

and she keeps us in the moment and keeps us in the story now partly I think the interleaving of the stories of different characters so you'll you'll read a chapter about Arthur and his story will have moved forward and then you'll read a chapter about Noreen and what is happening to her I think that does give you a little bit of you know light and shade um I mean I think a a

whole book of Narendra's story would have been, you know, something that many people would have found too much, too hard to get through. Elif Shafak, when I talked to her on the podcast, did want to describe the depth of what had happened to the, you know, real world Narendra and the fact that this is not over, that there are still, unfortunately,

women who are unaccounted for and who are being used as slaves hidden in houses in places like Turkey and Iraq. And I'm just going to go now to Alif's words and her description of that. This week it's the 10th anniversary of the Yezidi genocide. In 2014, in front of the eyes of the world, the

These militants, these fanatics, they attacked Yezidi communities. And we're talking about a very vulnerable minority, not only in the region but across the world. Yezidi lore talks about 72 massacres at least throughout their history. So they have been vilified, misunderstood, given all kinds of terrible names, targeted and violently attacked so many times.

But what happened in 2014, both in Syria and in Iraq, was again horror beyond words. Villages were attacked. The elderly were killed very deliberately because of, in my opinion, the elderly are the memory keepers. The Yazidi communities are not better.

based on written culture. The memory of the identity of this community is transmitted not through archives, but through oral storytelling. So when you kill the elderly, you are killing the collective memory. And that's what ISIS did. And then they killed so many men and boys, and they kidnapped women and girls, and they unfortunately have subjected them to horrific tortures and sexual slavery.

As we're speaking, 3,000 girls are still missing. And while I was writing this book, I read something that really made me pause. I kept those news, you know, in my research as an important part of my research.

In Ankara, very close to the neighborhood where I grew up, my maternal grandmother's house, a young Yazidi girl was saved by the police. And I'm talking about an ordinary family neighborhood, you know, and this girl had been kept there for years and years under horrific circumstances.

So those 3,000 girls are in quote unquote normal neighborhoods in Turkey, in Saudi Arabia, in Iraq, in Kuwait as we're speaking.

How is it possible that the neighbors are not saying anything? How come that kind of numbness exists? So there are lots of things we need to talk about. My point is the Yazidi genocide is not over yet. There's, of course, a lot of individual and collective healing that needs to take place. And I wanted to write about this community and their relationship to rivers, to water, and also cultural memory.

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But of course, there is also a third character, and she is certainly in the water theme. This is a character, a woman called Zalika, and she's a hydrologist. And after the breakdown of her marriage, she moves into a houseboat on the Thames. She is with us in contemporary times. Her story starts in 2018.

And she is deeply unhappy, she's struggling, but through her we learn a lot about what is happening to water systems in modern big cities like London, though this is also happening in our own cities, where rivers that have historically had their water course through water now, big suburbs and housing developments are covered over and they become hidden rivers.

And that sounds like, oh, heavens, it could be a lot of really boring science, though I need to immediately apologise to all of my wonderful colleagues at the Wellcome Trust who are scientists and never think science is boring. But I want to reassure everyone that you won't feel like you've picked up your high school science book. This is all very deftly done, but you do learn a lot about water through it. How did you find Zalika's story?

Well, I mean, it's a fascinating story because it gives us alternate ways to think about water. You know, I think we live in cities, we think of waters as kind of, I don't know, symbols of plenty, symbols of life. And I think in the novel, we see lots of different rivers. We see the Tigris, we see the Euphrates, we see the Thames in London. And all of these rivers have really complex histories of humans effectively mistreating them, dumping things in them,

You know, we begin in Victorian England with Arthur's mother, who's a tosher, which was a word I hadn't heard before, which is kind of a contemporary mudlarker, but more for subsistence than for just, you know, for jollies, finding old bottles and Roman pipes, finding things in the river that other people have thrown away.

and living from those. And then when we get to sort of contemporary Iraq, we have corpses that have been tortured floating down the rivers. And so there's a sort of sense of the river as a conduit of human misconduct, but also, you know, as a symbol of human sort of

thinking that we can control nature when in fact we can't. So often the rivers end up having a mind of their own. They produce behaviour in animals that swarm or flock, you know, in relation to humans creating dams and so forth. So we have really sort of complex roles, I guess is what I'm trying to say, of rivers in the novel. And cities themselves, you know, I keep coming back to the city in this novel. It's a novel that's really about

portrait of Victorian London. It's really about a portrait of sort of ancient Mesopotamia and of contemporary London. And across these cities, all of the cities are given qualities of rivers, you know, the rivers of people, rivers of pollution, the rivers at the surface, of course, and then these subterranean rivers, these kinds of hidden rivers. I don't know. Had you heard of daylighting before, Julia? Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

I had not heard of daylighting and daylighting is a movement to uncover these hidden rivers. So to bring them back to the surface. So if they've been covered in by, you know, drains or some sort of structure over the top to bring them back

to life by uncovering them and allowing them over time to get back to their natural state. So it's the river equivalent of the, you know, rewilding movement where people take out the plants that weren't native to the area or the agricultural crops that weren't native to the area to allow nature to come back to itself and for the, you know, things that are, have

been there throughout history, the plants, the animals, and in this case, the rivers to come back to their former glory. I mean, it's a beautiful concept, really something I didn't know anything about. No, me either. And I also was fascinated by this, by this idea of aquatic memory, which comes up. So Zalika, this character, who's a sort of water scientist has, has a mentor who we're not totally sure if he's gone a bit mad or not. It's sort of, it's, it's kind of unclear what,

But he ends up sort of ending his career semi in disgrace, sort of shunned by his colleagues. But he's got this theory that water has a memory. And I'll read a little passage and then maybe we can chat about it because I found that idea quite sort of fascinating.

Towards the end of his life, the professor became preoccupied with a hypothesis he referred to in his notes as aquatic memory. He argued that under certain circumstances, water, the universal solvent, retained evidence or memory of the solute particles that had dissolved in it, no matter how many times it was diluted or purified.

Even if years passed or centuries and not a single original molecule remained, each droplet of water maintained a unique structure, distinguishable from the next, marked forever by what it once contained. Water, in other words, remembered. And I sort of marked this passage because I felt it seemed to touch on so much of the novel. I think even though we're sort of supposed to see this character in some ways as slightly mad,

I felt that the novelist sort of adopted that thinking throughout the novel. I don't know, did you sort of feel as though the novel was arguing for this idea of aquatic memory? I'm thinking there of the raindrop that sort of touches all of the characters, the rivers, all of it. What did you make of this? Yeah, the novel gives water agency, doesn't it? And if it's got agency, it's got memory. So we actually have...

words that are coming from the raindrop that is recurring across the characters and across the times. And it is completely persuasive. You're not there reading going, oh, as if, as if a talking raindrop, give me a break. I mean, there is no point where you are in that mode. You are completely in the moment with it. Now, whether...

you know, if we had on the podcast someone who is a contemporary water scientist, they would be talking to us about aquatic memory. I'm pretty doubtful about that. I don't think so. But it's a wonderful kind of literary device. And

Even though, you know, I think we would both agree aquatic memory is not going to be a scientific concept coming to us anytime soon. You know, nature and water do have a form of agency and agency.

you know if anything one of the vices in the human condition and we are reaping the results of that now is that we have gone throughout history marched throughout history believing we were the only ones that had agency and we could treat nature and water any way we wanted to and it would be fine because we were the ones with the agency and dominion and nature didn't have it

And now we're learning to our great cost. Nature's agency is always there. The holidays are all about sharing with family. Meals, couches, stories, grandma's secret pecan pie recipe. And now you can also share a cart with Instacart's Family Carts.

Everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are, so you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams, or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart, and then share the meals and the moments.

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And it's that sort of human delusion that we're in control, isn't it? And I feel like many of the characters kind of carry that idea that they're in total control of their fate, that they're sort of shaping their way in the world. Not Noreen, of course, she's sort of acutely aware that she's not in control and that forces well beyond her are sort of pressing in on her. But

Constantly through the novel, we see characters kind of having to reorient their sense of who they are in the world as things beyond their control kind of crop up in their lives. Zalika is a character that brings us all this water knowledge, but she is also someone who's thinking through and her life is bringing her circumstances where she does need to confront water.

who she is in the sense of who she is because she is someone who grew up in the United Kingdom, someone who's made her way as a scientist in the United Kingdom. But she is someone who lost her parents, came to live with her uncle. She's from a migrant background and trying to reconcile that with making her way in the United Kingdom. And she, in some ways, is frustrated and

by her uncle who has become more British than the British in order to adapt to the environment that he's in. And she's coming to grips too with who she is post the end of her marriage and what love and fulfilment will mean for her in the future. And there's a great passage that reads,

The last door on the right displays her name, Dr. Zalika Clark,

For a moment, she stares at the plaque. Upon getting married, she took her husband's surname. Now it will probably have to change again. Women are expected to be like rivers, readjusting, shape-shifting. She's an interesting character to me because she sort of exemplifies, I think, so many of the conundrums that immigrants find themselves in, that they're expected to

to conform and assimilate to a new culture, but retain enough of their sense of identity that they don't betray, you know, where they're from. And then there's all those pressures to be a kind of model minority, which is the idea, you know, you move to a new country and immediately you're a representative for your home culture. Any sort of misdemeanours can

committed by anyone of your nationality are all sheeted home to you. You can never make a misstep. And you can see that she's been on this path of almost following her uncle, who has, as you say, he's more British than British. He finds himself in the House of Lords. He went to a private prep school. He does debating. He owns a chain of fast food franchises. He's the sort of picture of

of someone who has blended in so well that he starts collecting antiquities himself. You know, he in fact starts replicating what the British Museum is doing, you know, so she has this sort of pathway ahead of her and he's been a wonderful uncle to her, you know, after the loss of her parents. But there comes a time where she realises that she needs to take a different path and that she doesn't want to go down that path of

sort of acquisition without considering what the cost is. And I don't want to give away any spoilers, but there's sort of a fascinating ethical conundrum that comes up in relation to her uncle towards the end of the novel where she really has to sort of evaluate her

where his morals and ethics have landed in this process of becoming more English than the English. And she decides that she wants to sort of distinguish herself in lots of ways and take a different path. And one of those, of course, is, you know, in relation to her sexuality, in relation to her relationship, there's an interesting trajectory that she goes through involving a sort of a tattoo artist. And I was really fascinated by,

by the tattoo artist. The tattoo artist also has a connection to the epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh just crops up everywhere and everywhere and the tattoo artist sort of specialises in cuneiform which is the kind of language that

Bilgamesh was written in that's the script and I was fascinated by the way in which even that symbolism of the tattoo kind of recurs and touches other parts of the novel so it's not just Zuleika who changes it's it's sort of she touches on lots of other characters and then they change too and and we find different connections across these stories that we've thought you

you know, have been quite disparate until they start to sort of connect without giving too, too much away. Yes, the stories certainly do twist and combine. I mean, I would summarise this book. It's immensely readable.

I mean, if people are looking for listeners are looking for a book where you'll be turning the pages. I mean, we're still quite a way away from summer holidays. But if you're thinking about, you know, books you're going to take away with you, I think this kind of book easily will be on that list. People will find it immensely readable, but

very thought-provoking. What's your all-up summary of it? I think it's sort of a novel for people who like to learn something when they read fiction. You know, I think there's a lot of detail about these different timeframes. There's a lot of sort of interesting facts and things you can take away. You know, I find myself...

Perhaps the thing I like the most about the novel, other than Gilgamesh, obviously, was also the sort of the knowledge that I gleaned about water. And, you know, so I think it sort of satisfies the sort of page turning sort of historical fiction sort of genre, but also with some depth and complexity and big ideas that it kind of invites you to carry away with you as well.

Yep, I think that's absolutely right. Well, it's been fantastic talking to you about this book. And as I said at the start, this is sort of a double header because I'd invite listeners who haven't done so to listen to the episode where I talk to Alif Shafak about her life and her writing. She is the author of many books. I've read a number of them, not all of them, because she is the author of many books, but

I particularly like The Island of Missing Trees is a fabulous book. There's a lot to get your head into here. So you can hear from Alif herself and then hopefully our discussion has also provoked some thinking.

please let us know via social media what you thought of there are rivers in the sky and please let me thank you for all of the feedback we're getting across social media it is great to hear about what you're reading and what you're thinking about what you're reading it's great fun uh sarah thank you once again for being on this and we keep finding books with poets or poems in them uh

The Wren, The Wren had a poet in it and poetry and here we are again. I don't know if we're going to be able to continue that but so far doing very well. We are and it's funny that Julia you know when you have a poet talking to you about books it's funny how often books with poems end up on the list but such a pleasure to chat about this great book. Terrific to talk to you. Thank you.

Thank you.

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