INSKEEP: I want people to know that the narrator of this story, to the extent that there is one, is a fig tree, which speaks in the first person. Is this how you came to that, then? You wanted a neutral observer of it all?

Ada’s history teacher asks her students not to patronise or judge the older person they are interviewing. Is that actually possible? What a wonderful read! This book moved me to tears... in the best way. Powerful and poignant' Reese Witherspoon

The story begins in the “late 2010s” with Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old north Londoner. Her mother, Defne, died 11 months earlier, leaving Ada and her father Kostas scalded by loss. Kostas grieves discreetly, consumed by misery in the garden at night, while Ada watches from an upper window.

Ever since, Cyprus has been divided, with a United Nations peacekeeping force maintaining a buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Adding to the multicultural mix are British military bases still on the island, which used to be part of the British Empire until 1960.

A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory * Literary Review * I’ve always believed in inherited pain,” says Shafak. “It’s not scientific, perhaps, but things we cannot talk about easily within families do pass from one generation to the next, unspoken. In immigrant families, the older generation often wants to protect the younger from past sorrow, so they choose not to say much, and the second generation is too busy adapting, being part of the host country, to investigate. So it’s left to the third generation to dig into memory. I’ve met many third-generation immigrants who have older memories even than their parents. Their mothers and fathers tell them: ‘This is your home, forget about all that.’ But for them, identity matters.” How did you enjoy the branching and circular arcs in the novel? Were they intriguing? Confusing? Soothing? What other novels have you enjoyed with non-linear storylines and how did the arc of those novels unfold? They want to give the dead a proper burial, a sense of dignity and the families a sense of closure, a possibility for healing.” As Shafak shares in her interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR, the fig tree in the novel represents an observer with longevity and the experience of immigrants who are “rooted, uprooted and rerooted.”