Description
Sweeping across centuries and stretching from Mesopotamia to London this enchanting new novel by a Booker Prize finalist conjures a trio of characters living in 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: Ninveveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey Narin a ten-year-old Yazhidi 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.”
