“that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.” I never thought I would be able to emphsize so much with a tree. A beautiful story about migration, family, history and cyprus, all embedded into the metaphor of nature. The book is sometimes a bit slow and soft, not as hard hitting as I might have hoped, but very lyrically written, and it was really interesting to hear the story told from the perspective of the fig tree. And the ending?? my heart “Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings.”

Das Buch gibt gute Einblicke in die Geschichte Zyperns sowie die heute noch vorhandene (politische) Spaltung der Insel, die unterschiedlichen Kulturen und die Denkweisen verschiedener Generationen. Diese, sind zwar fiktiv, jedoch gut recherchiert und dementsprechend gut an die tatsächliche Geschichte angelehnt. Leider hat mir der Aufbau des Buches nicht so gut gefallen.

Élif has a wonderful writing style, honestly I’ve not read a book with such good intertwining of timelines in a long time that it seems like one flowing narration. I like how she used the fig tree as a narrator and at the end finding out the fig tree was connecte to Defne was interesting. Ada and Kostos and their surroundings were so well developed you can’t help but love their personalities. However, I gave this 4.5⭐️s because there are a few things that could have been done better. These include: 1. developing the happy fig owners’ stories to know their background and history and also the way they ended up in the well dead. 2. There was so much focus on Konstaz and little to do with Defne. This story would have been so much more elevated if we knew more about her death, her life from the point they first separated and what illness she had. The way the writer just tell us she was found hanging and it wasn’t ruled a suicide is an injustice to her central role in the book. 3. More about konstaz mother and Defne’s parents and that relationship. All in all this was a fantastic read and 10/10 would recommend.

I wish this was the first Elif Shafak I read. I would have loved it more than anything in this entire world. However, having read 10 minutes and 38 seconds, and Forty Rules of Love, just felt like I knew where this was going. I knew the story, the writing. And... my brain was happy to be reading the book because its beautifully written but also wanted to move on after a point.