There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

It often flows through our lives unnoticed—until there’s too much or too little of it. Then, it dominates our thoughts, with phrases like “glacial retreat” or “atmospheric rivers” crashing into our awareness. Words like “drought” or “flood” become painfully vivid reminders of water’s power to sustain or destroy. I was referring to an H2O.

In Elif Shafak’s mesmerizing novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, water becomes far more than a life source—it becomes a storyteller, weaving memories across time and space. A single droplet journeys through centuries and continents, falling on the head of a ruthless Assyrian king, transforming into a snowflake on a Victorian child’s tongue, and reappearing as a life-giving potion in the hands of a Yazidi grandmother escaping exile. Shafak imbues this molecule with a sense of memory, a fantastical thread connecting humanity’s shared and fractured past. Early on, after a hauntingly visceral scene, the novel’s central thesis emerges: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

The narrative begins in the 640s B.C.E., with the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal. From there, it leaps across millennia to Victorian London, where a boy born in the slums becomes “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.” Loosely inspired by Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur rises to academic prominence, drawn to the Epic of Gilgamesh much like Ashurbanipal before him. Finally, the story lands in 2014 along the banks of the Tigris River. Here, Narin, a Yazidi girl, prepares to travel with her grandmother to Iraq, where she will be baptized in a sacred temple. When Narin questions why they are being driven from their homeland, her grandmother answers with a poignant truth: “For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.”

Shafak’s narrative flows seamlessly through these disparate times and places, uniting them through water’s eternal presence. Her prose is lush and evocative, evoking both the grandeur of ancient Mesopotamia and the quiet resilience of a Yazidi family forced to flee their home. The novel is a meditation on memory, loss, and the fragility of ecosystems like the Tigris and the Thames, reminding readers of the beauty and tragedy that water carries with it.

There Are Rivers in the Sky is more than a novel—it’s an urgent call to remember. Shafak’s storytelling seeps into the reader’s soul, uncovering a sense of awe for both humanity’s shared history and the natural world that binds us together. Like the rivers it describes, this book leaves an indelible mark, urging us to honor what water never forgets.