The best book of 2021, as far as I am concerned, is out. The storyteller, the human rights advocate, the feminist and, as she prefers to introduce herself, the citizen of humanity, Elif Shafak, created yet another masterpiece. It’s a novel on identity, belonging, on migrants’ traumas, on clash and coexistence between nations, religions, East and West, life and death. Ultimately, it’s a story about love and animosity, ever-present in books and life, alike. Once again, Elif’s new work published in 2021 comes to show the true scale and majesty of a talent. What a triumph and testament to her unquestionable genius!

The novel is full of rich details set in nature, is packed with gastronomic terminology, is abounding of details about songbirds and butterflies, is describing luxuriantly the subterranean world of roots and the stunning diversity of bees. If nothing else can convince you that nature can speak, read this book. Nature is clearly talking to us, and it will be an unfortunate mistake for the human ear to remain too limited to hear that voice.

Speaking about voices – just as I was thinking that after a dead sex worker claimed the narrative voice in Shafak’s “10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world” and the author couldn’t ever be able to come up with anything more brilliant than that, The Island of Missing Trees was out. Little did I know, I told myself, realising that in this new book one even more unexpected protagonist tells the beautifully crafted love story between Kostas – a Greek Christian and Defne – a Turkish Muslim.

The love story commuting between Cyprus and UK, goes back and forth in time and is told by an unforeseen voice – a voice of a fig tree. And while I read the first pages commuting between pieces of my humble religious knowledge, my thoughts drift, trying to figure out the fig tree symbolism. My associations first glide towards Adam and Eve being covered by garments made of fig tree leaves, then float towards Buddha who is said to have found enlightenment by sitting under a sacred fig. My logical knowledge is cut short here remembering the argument that we learned of Adam having an apple only due to a translation mistake – given the garments made of fig tree leaves, the fruit in the Garden of Eden might have most probably been a fig, not an apple.

And while the story immerses all my senses into interpreting the fig tree parable, I find my own enlightenment when reading that “the places where we are born are the shape of our lives” and while going further I admit that I was also at some point reflecting “on the cycle of belonging and exile, the question whether to leave or to stay.”

Everyone can relate to this story and can find themselves in this book. The Island of Missing Trees asks us important questions about losing home, about migration trauma and coping with change, about starting new chapters in lives and giving a second chance to love stories. But, still, at the end of the day, “what do those of us who are immigrants do with our yesterdays, how are our children affected by our pain?”

These questions take me back to the years when I was a young teenager, in a collapsing empire, experiencing partition, division, and ethnic violence just as the book’s protagonists experience in Cyprus. The parable about loss and belonging told by the fig tree becomes an equivalent of my childhood trauma when I saw unusual transformations in people personalities, also witnessing love stories collapsing and families separating being driven by the destructive wave of nationalism and conflicts. I witnessed former atheists suddenly becoming deeply religious politicians, I witnessed Russian and Romanian ethnic identity couples renouncing to love in what was becoming the independent Moldova. I silently asked myself questions like the ones The Island of Missing Trees is asking. Most of them still pending.

The characters of the novel commute from Cyprus to the UK together with their migrants trauma. As a child, I commuted from one country to another without physically crossing a border. But I witnessed the Transnistria armed conflict at a very close sight. I heard exploding bombs, gun rows and I saw bleeding young men being driven into the A&E at the hospital where my parents were working 24/7 those days. I was even secretly hating Hippocrates when my parents volunteered to drive to the red zone to bring medicines to the wounded, quoting an oath I refused to comprehend. I got it later. Love was the answer.

There is always trauma that comes with the change driven by a clash between nations. The way we address that trauma and talk about it is key. Elif advocates for communication between generations. Elif brings love to the headline.

“While religions clash to have the final say and nationalists teach us a sense of superiority and exclusiveness, superstitions, on either side of the border, coexist in rare harmony”, reads the novel. What a perpetual wisdom! I reckon this is how you value a book – when it transcends borders and cultures and becomes a reality everyone can relate to, it stops being a book, it is an ecosystem in its own right; instantaneously, its author becomes a philosopher. Not sure about my UK born and bred friends but my friends from the Eastern Europe have always been united in their superstitions, regardless of their ethnic identities. For example, just like the novel’s protagonists, my Eastern friends would believe it’s better not to laugh too much as this might lead to tears in the end.

As I was celebrating the best 2021 book, as far as I am concerned, as I was applauding the genius of Elif Shafak, the novel’s end has moved me to tears. I warmly recommend reading it to its magnificent end in order to also celebrate the talent of Elif Shafak in tears. “We are afraid of happiness. From a tender age we are taught that for every morsel of contentment, suffering will follow. For every laughter there will be tears.” Well, let’s check if it also works the other way around.