The Island of Missing Trees

A Greek Cypriot boy and a Turkish Cypriot girl meet in a tavern in 1970s Nicosia, on an island about to be cut in two, and decades later their daughter in London tries to understand a grief nobody will explain. Part of the novel is narrated by a fig tree. Shafak uses that device to hold the buried history literally, and writes about partition, migration and inherited silence without letting the metaphor go slack.