When a bomb explodes, no-one notices the tree that catches fire from a spark. Absorbed by their own losses, people do not see the suffering of other creatures. In her most recent novel, Elif Shafak reverses the roles. She gives voice to the plants, and they are the ones who tell a story about migration, memory, and the end of a certain world order.
This story is both little and big. It concerns a few people, one tree and two European islands. But it’s about all of us, too: humans, bats and mosquitoes alike, the reflexive silence of plants, their relationships with genies, and the relentless movement that connects all life on Earth, despite the multiple divides we so violently entrench.
The Island of Missing Trees, the Turkish writer’s most recent novel, is a meditation on co-existence, as well as one of the first examples of how ecological ethics can change literature from within. When so many authors fill in the narrative gaps of our times by writing long-neglected herstories or creating the anticipated, queer narrators, Shafak – who
