Their deaths epitomise the banality of random and arbitrary hate, fuelled by senseless ethnic and intercommunal conflicts. Their short lives are the centre of the novel, akin to the Fig Tree. Smadar was killed on 4 September 1997, aged 14, by a terrorist bomb Abir on 16 June 2007, aged 10, felled by a young Israeli soldier’s rubber bullet. In contrast, McCann’s story is of realistic magic, a love story between two fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, whose daughters were both, a decade apart, victims of the occupation and conflict waged by Israel on Palestine. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.” It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. It is a thinking, sentient fig tree, prone to profound observations on human behaviour from its place of witness, noting, for example: “Humans are strange… full of contradictions. The Fig Tree is at the centre of The Island of Missing Trees, and the story is entangled in its roots, trunk and branches. “ Girdling ” is what happens to some people in whom love and hate collide, but I’ll leave you to discover that unusual word’s meaning. It’s about love in a time of hate, and how hate insinuates itself into love, relationships and ultimately their offspring. It’s about the love between two men, between a Fig Tree and the people it shades, between a daughter and her father. As young people, they fall in love in the kindlings of the 1974 civil war in Cyprus, get torn apart, then fall in love again in the embers of its aftermath. It’s a love story at heart, between a Turkish Cypriot woman, Defne, and a Greek Cypriot man, Kostas Kazantzakis. Musical, muscular, delicate and soaring, it is a book for our times from a writer at the height of his powers.Shafak’s story is of magical realism.

In this epic novel named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides Colum McCann crosses centuries and continents, stitching time, art, history, nature and politics into a tapestry of friendship, love, loss and belonging. There was a candy bracelet in her pocket she hadn't had time to eat yet. Bassam's ten-year-old daughter Abir was shot and killed by a member ofthe border police outside her school. Rami's thirteen-year-old girl Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber while out shopping with her friends. The same journey for Bassam takes an hour and a half.īoth men have lost their daughters. It takes Rami fifteen minutes to drive to the West Bank. Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin live near one another yet they exist worlds apart. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart' KAMILA SHAMSIE 'Nothing like any book you've ever read' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Apeirogon review