「经济学人」There Are Rivers in the Sky

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New fiction What should you write about your homeland when you cannot return? Elif Shafak, a novelist, returns with an ambitious book about water and memory There Are Rivers in the Sky. By Elif Shafak. Knopf; 464 pages; $30. Viking; £18.99 In a popular TED talk in 2010, Elif Shafak, a British-Turkish bestselling novelist living in exile in London, touted the boundary-flouting, heart-expanding powers of fiction, comparing it to “flowing water”. Now water, as both a substance and metaphor, courses through “There Are Rivers in the Sky”. In this ambitious, centuries-spanning novel, Ms Shafak uses various incarnations of water—from the “mercurial and unforgiving” Tigris in ancient Mesopotamia to the “acrid and vile” Thames in Victorian London to the “drying, dying force” of climate change in the 21st century—to consider the forces and stories that connect people across continents and time. Just as raindrops and tears evaporate up to the skies and return “to this t ………………………………