By: Sayantani Biswas
A conversational review on migration, memory, belonging and the rivers we carry
There are books we read, and then there are books that seem to read us back. Elif Shafak’s “There Are Rivers in the Sky” belongs to the second category.
Initially, the novel appears to be about water, history and the extraordinary journey of a single drop. However, Shafak attempts to do something far more ambitious. She asks what it means to belong to a place, to lose a place, and to carry fragments of one place into another. Her rivers are geographical, historical and emotional. They flow through empires and modern cities, through memory and migration, through grief and the stubborn human need to begin again.
The novel moves across time and continents, connecting characters whose lives might otherwise never have touched. At its heart is Arthur, a nineteenth-century boy from poverty in Victorian England whose life becomes entangled with the ancient world of Mesopotamia. Alongside him are Naryn, a Yazidi girl whose life is shaped by violence and displacement, and Zaleekhah, a young woman in contemporary London whose relationship with water and identity feels particularly intimate. Their stories are separated by decades and geography, yet Shafak makes them feel like tributaries of the same river.
That is one of the novel’s greatest pleasures: it refuses to treat history as something safely locked in the past.
Instead, history leaks.
It leaks into families, museums, borders, languages and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from. It leaks into the lives of immigrants who arrive in a new country carrying invisible luggage: an accent, a childhood, a recipe, a photograph, a loss, a name that people pronounce incorrectly, a memory of a street that no longer looks the same. Shafak understands that migration is not simply the physical act of moving from one country to another. It is the strange, ongoing negotiation between the person you were and the person you are becoming.
That idea resonated with me more than I expected.
I have been an international student in London for the last eleven months, and London has taught me that arriving somewhere is not the same as belonging there. You can learn the underground map, discover your favourite coffee shop, become familiar with the rhythm of lectures and deadlines, and still occasionally feel like you are standing slightly outside the picture.
There are little moments when this feeling appears. Hearing a familiar language on a crowded street. Finding a food that tastes almost—but not quite—like home. Calling someone thousands of miles away because suddenly you need to hear a voice that understands where you came from without explanation. And then there are the opposite moments: laughing with people from entirely different backgrounds, discovering that someone else’s idea of “home” is as complicated as yours, and realising that London has quietly become part of your own story.
Navigating through and beyond “There Are Rivers in the Sky” in London made those experiences feel less private. Shafak’s characters reminded me that the immigrant experience is rarely a clean before-and-after story. We do not leave one identity at an airport departure gate and collect another at arrivals. We accumulate selves. We become layered version of ourselves.
Perhaps that is why water is such a powerful image throughout the novel. Water does not ask where it belongs. It crosses borders. It changes shape. It disappears, returns, evaporates and falls again. It can separate people, but it can also connect them. Shafak turns this natural fact into a profound metaphor for human life: we are constantly moving, even when we think we are standing still.
The book is also a meditation on what survives.
Civilisations disappear. Languages become endangered. Objects are stolen, displayed and reinterpreted. People die. Cities change. Yet stories persist. A tiny fragment of an ancient poem can travel through centuries and suddenly speak to a person living in a completely different world. That feels especially relevant now, when migration, war and cultural loss are not abstract historical concepts but daily realities.
Shafak writes with the confidence of a storyteller who knows that beauty and brutality can exist on the same page. Her prose can be lyrical without becoming weightless. There is a sense of wonder in the novel, but it is never an uncomplicated wonder. The past is beautiful and terrible; heritage can be a source of pride and a site of conflict; museums can preserve memory while also raising uncomfortable questions about who gets to possess it.
And yet, for all its historical sweep, the novel repeatedly returns to something wonderfully ordinary: the human need to be seen.
That, ultimately, is what stayed with me.
We spend so much of our lives trying to explain ourselves—where we are from, where we live, what we believe, what we have lost, what we hope to become. Perhaps the most generous thing another person can do is simply listen. Shafak’s characters are connected not because their lives are identical, but because their vulnerabilities are recognisable.
If I have one reservation, it is that the novel sometimes carries so many ideas—history, ecology, colonialism, migration, memory, cultural ownership, grief—that its ambition can feel almost overflowing. But perhaps that excess is part of its design. Rivers overflow too. They refuse neat boundaries.
And maybe that is the point.
After ten months in London, I am beginning to understand that home is not always a fixed coordinate on a map. Sometimes it is a conversation. Sometimes it is a smell from a kitchen far away. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it is a memory you did not realise you were carrying. And sometimes, unexpectedly, it is a city you once arrived in as a stranger.
“There Are Rivers in the Sky” left me thinking about all the rivers inside us—the places we leave, the places we enter, and the memories that continue flowing between them.
Shafak does not merely tell us that everything is connected. She makes us feel the connection.
And when you finish the book, you may find yourself looking at water differently.
You may even wonder where your own river began—and where it is carrying you next.
