Books I've loved: There are Rivers in the Sky

 

This one was loaned to me by one of the members of my book group - the one who probably knows me and my taste in books the best.  So when she said she thought I'd like this one, I listened.

And she was right.

I did, indeed, love this one.

It's a sprawling, epic novel that covers centuries and history and interweaves stories from different eras, starting with ancient Mesopotamia and finishing around 2018.

There are three main protagonists, Zaleekah, a hydrologist living in London in 2018, Narin, a young Yazidi girl living with her grandmother on the banks of the Tigris as it is about to be dammed, flooding her village, and Arthur (real name King Arthur of the Slums and Sewers), a Victorian pauper who grows up to be one of the British Museum's leading experts on ancient Mesopotamian poetry and script.

As you'd probably expect rom a book with "rivers" in the title, rivers and water are central to the story, from a drop of rain falling into King Ashurbanipal's hair to the Thames and Tigris rivers winding their way through history.  That aspect of it reminded me of a writing exercise I did at school, where we wrote a story from the POV of a water molecule, following it through history and the various different lives it could have touched.

While all three stories were interesting, I think I enjoyed Arthur's the most, maybe because the book followed him from birth to death, giving us the most complete picture of him. The other characters we only saw for short periods of time, like snapshots of their existence.

Just how these three people could be linked does not become clear until the very end of the book, although it's teased at throughout.  I felt like the eventual resolution was beautifully underplayed - not made into the big, melodramatic moment it could have been.

I loved this book.  As a kid, I went through a period of wanting to be an archaeologist, and this tickled all the parts of me that love the mysteries of ancient civilizations.  I know a little about the region and the history and even the poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, that's central to the story.   But I know even more now.

I loved the way real life characters and events wove through the fictional story - particularly when Charles Dickens showed up in Arthur's storyline for a bit.

I have no idea how anyone could go about writing a book like this, with so many threads and timelines and histories weaving through it.  The very idea of it boggles my tiny brain.  But it works so well here, every piece of every story compliments a part of one or both the others.

So I'd recommend this one highly.  It's complicated in the very best way, but also has fabulous characters you can't help but care for.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

From the Booker Prize finalist author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time.

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”