Elif Shafak signs a particularly rich thirteenth novel with The rivers of the sky, Released in English in 2024 and whose French translation appeared at Flammarion on August 20, 2025. “With this book, Elif Shafak still perfects her reputation as a storyteller accomplished. She enjoys, in addition to wisdom and deep empathy, an encyclopedic knowledge of mythologies forged in the regions of the globe where she grew up”, That is to say the Middle East, greeted The New Statesman Last year. The famous Turkish author, installed in the British capital since 2013, takes the reader of ancient Assyria to London in the 19th centurye century passing through Iraq and Turkey today, over the water journey.
Four stories and four protagonists are thus linked by the same drop that touched them: the cruel and literate assyrian -style king Assurbanipal, who reigned in the VIIe century BC. AD, to Arthur Smyth, a child of London slums in the 1840s fascinated by l’Gilgamesh epic that the ancient king had protected in his famous library. Until the 2010s with Zaleekhah, a London hydrologist from Iraq, and Naryn, a Yézidie child who fled with his family the persecution of Daesh against this minority in Iraq – to join the Turkish Anatolia
