This is the first book in the subscription I bought for myself from Bionic Book Subscription. Just like the three books they sent me a few years ago this book is exceptional. I will probably keep up my subscription when this one expires, all the books they send me are really good and I’m happy to have read them.
The question is whether I would have picked up this book on my own and that is something I’m not sure about. If I’d walked into a bookshop in Australia it wouldn’t have fit my criteria when requesting a recommendation and I rarely look at other people’s recommendations apart from bookshops. But I am glad I’ve read this book.
It’s set in four different time frames. The first timeframe is only the beginning of the book and we are referred back there on multiple occasions and in various ways. We’re taken back to the time of Nineveh when the city was destroyed. We’re then taken through mid-Victorian London, 2014 next to the River Tigris, and then back to London, but only four years later. Running through this is the theme that we are all connected with one drop of water, a drop of water that is consumed and transformed across the continents and centuries. This explains the locations of the River Tigris and The Thames.
The history in here is fantastic. I’ve no idea how accurate it is, but Nineveh was supposedly the city that Jonah was sent to by God to prophecy. That instantly draws me in because we read the Book of Jonah every year on Yom Kippur. It’s meant to be a city of evil and Jonah is sent there by God in order to tell them to repent before they are destroyed. Why this is relevant to this book is because Shafak shows us this. She takes us back to the time when Jonah would have been sent there to prophecy about their destruction. No, we don’t see Jonah, but we do see the destruction in later parts of the book.
Shafak has introduced me to the best opening of a book. Until now I’ve not had a favourite first paragraph. It just illustrates her beautiful writing.
Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.
Just a beautiful sentence that reminds everything starts with something little. Every book starts with one book, every article starts with a single letter, every storm starts with a single raindrop. Every movement starts with just one line.
The other reviews didn’t like the woman in 2018 London. Zaleekhah is a hydrologist and she’s leaving a broken marriage. What I never understood was what was wrong with the marriage. It never felt clear to me, and we rarely saw her marriage. I do feel that the marriage is irrelevant because the husband wasn’t as excited by water as Zaleekhah, and as the rest of the book is guided by water then he would be totally irrelevant to the story. Every other part of the story is guided by water, whether a drop of water, a storm, a river or a snowflake, the imagery is beautiful. Anything that is outside of that imagery doesn’t quite fit the story.
I didn’t like the parts set in 2014 alongside the River Tigris. Not because they weren’t well written, not because I didn’t like the characters, and certainly not for any other writing-type reason. I didn’t like the history that was being depicted. The fact the Islamic State were trying to eliminate the Yazidis was a dreadful time in world history and this was fairly explicitly written. We were shown how the Yazidis were being killed or absorbed into Islamic State families, shown rather than told. That was one of the beautiful things about this book, it is textbook writing, we were shown what was happening rather than being told.
I made a lot of notes while reading this book, but I think I’ve rambled enough and won’t share any of them. I loved this book, I loved the characters and I would be happy to read another book by Shafak. Many thanks to the Bionic Book Subscription team for picking another book right for me.