I recommend this 2024 novel unreservedly. I read it because I’ve enjoyed Elif Shafak’s previous work but there has never been anything as riveting as There Are Rivers In the Sky.

It’s about rivers, water, love, cruelty and destruction, hope and redemption among other things and it’s split across four time zones. Ashurbanipal was King of Assyria, six centuries before Christ and gets a mention on the Biblical book of Ezra. He is famous for being a cultured man who built a beautiful library in Nineveh on the bank of the Tigris. He was also a ruthless tyrant and it can seem difficult to reconcile the two sides of his character until you remember that the Nazis were fond of Mozart and reflect that such patterns recur throughout history.

Fast forward to the nineteenth century and Arthur Smyth (inspired by real life Assyriologist, George Smith) is born into poverty but graced with a phenomenal memory and, although it’s never said overtly, is probably on what we would now call the autistic spectrum. He is reading Assyrian cuneiform tablets, from many centuries BC in the British Museum. His quest is to piece together the Saga of Gilgamesh.

Then there’s Narin who lives with her father and grandmother in Turkey in 2014. They are Yazidi people which means they are neither Christian nor Muslim although there are overlapping beliefs and stories.  All is fairly peaceful (notwithstanding developers gradually driving local people away) until they decide to go on a religious pilgrimage to Iran where they get caught up in ethnic cleansing of Kurds by ISIS and the sort of horror which makes the soles of my feet go clammy as I read.

Meanwhile Zaleekhah, leaving a failed marriage, is trying to find herself in present day London. Orphaned in childhood because her parents were drowned by the Tigris on a camping trip, she works as a hydrologist. We meet her wealthy, kindly but misguided Uncle Malek and her wise, new friend Nen. Zaleekhah lives in a houseboat on the Thames. Water flows through this novel like a life force.

Eventually – no spoilers – Shafak establishes links between these four narratives and my eyes shone as I read on, as it gradually and seamlessly comes together.  There are Rivers in the Sky tells a powerful, if complex, story very accessibly. And Shafak blends the intense power of love, in all its forms (Narin’s grandmother is a wonderful example of selfless, unconditional love) with the importance of storytelling itself as a force against evil whether it’s raping children despised as worthless infidels or, in 21^st century London, using money to exploit children for your own ends, even if your intentions are worthy.

It’s a richly spiritual novel too – and I speak as a religious unbeliever. Leila whom Arthur meets on his expeditions to the Tigris has qualities and dimensions which go way beyond sexual attraction and cross the centuries. Narin who has worsening deafness which will soon be total, can sense and understand things beyond herself because she has been schooled by her sagacious grandmother.  And Zaleekhah, a 2020s working woman, is driven by decency, as well as struggling with depression but Nen has perceptiveness which goes way beyond ordinary common sense.

There is also a quasi-transcendental environmental message tucked into this novel’s myriad folds and crevices. A precious valley is about to be flooded near Narin’s home in Turkey. The new dam will drown many ancient buildings and artefacts. Water lies as the heart of everything which happens to everyone in the novel. We probably all know that there are a finite number of molecules in the world so that any drop of water has, in a sense, been naturally recycled many times. Shafak uses raindrops as symbolic link between her characters in this stunningly beautiful, multi-dimensional novel.

In short, I loved it. And I think you will too.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

John Steinbeck’s great gift is to be able to wrench the guts out of you and leave you moved, to near speechlessness. And he does that so powerfully that he is an almost incomparable writer. Have another look at his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, if you don’t believe me.

But his best known novel, in the UK anyway, is Of Mice and Men (1937), probably because it was once studied by 90 per cent of GCSE students. Take the 20-something chap who delivered my groceries the other day, for example, He spotted my half-reread copy lying on the table (it’s yet another novel germane to my current writing project) and told me that he had “done” it at school. He was of Afro-Caribbean descent, apparently unabashed – and that fact is relevant in this instance.

Of Mice and Men, which I have taught to many classes, is now falling out of favour because it contains racial slurs. Well of course it does. It contains slurs against disability (mental and physical) and women too. That’s the whole point. But John Steinbeck is testingly putting these prejudices into the thoughts and mouths of his characters. He isn’t condoning or agreeing with them – or expecting the reader to. That’s why it’s such a fine starting point for discussion. It works powerfully against racism, misogyny and “ableism”. Sadly it has now been dropped from the curriculum in Wales, and it won’t be long, I suspect, before it slides away from young people elsewhere too at the behest of ignorant, blinkered adults who really should know better. All the best fiction makes the reader think and that often means feeling uncomfortable. It’s one of the ways in which understanding is built and prejudice broken down. That’s the purpose of literature.

We’re on a ranch in California in the Depression of the nineteen thirties. The main crop is barley and most of the labour force is itinerant. George and Lennie arrive there, having have to leave their last job in a hurry.  Lennie has severe learning difficulties and phenomenal physical strength which he doesn’t understand how to control. George, who isn’t related to him, is a quasi fraternal carer who loves him and tries to keep him out of trouble, despite the frustrations. On the ranch they meet, Candy, a former labourer who now does the cleaning because he lost his hand in a farming machine. Another misfit, is Crooks, a black, disabled stable hand who lives separately from the other man. George and Lennie  dream about getting a small holding of their own and Candy offers to contribute his compensation money so, briefly, it looks like a serious possibility, perhaps with Crooks also on board. Then the boss’s daughter-in-law “Curly’s wife” (another pitifully unhappy person) saunters in and the whole thing ends in searing tragedy. As Burns put it: “The best laid schemes o’mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”.

Along the way, there’s the euthanasia of Candy’s old dog – a symbol of social “uselessness” – various small animals  which Lennie loves too much and some wonderful characters. Slim, for instance, works permanently on the ranch as the jerkline skinner, a mule driver who can control a line of animals with great skill. He is sensitive, watchful and intelligent unlike Carlson who doesn’t do empathy or subtlety. Even Curly, the boss’s son, is a man full of insecurities which he conceals behind aggression. There are no “baddies” or “goodies” in this superb novel – just a cast of struggling people and Steinbeck evinces sympathy at some level for every one of them.

Indeed they do casually refer to Crooks (nicknamed for his back which is bent by injury) as the “stable buck” and the words nigger and negro are bandied about, even by Crooks himself. This is, after all the 1930s and men on a ranch like this wouldn’t have thought twice about the language they used.  But we indentify with his loneliness just as we do with elderly Candy who knows he’ll be thrown on the scrap heap as soon as he can no longer sweep floors. And as for Lennie, every offensive name imaginable is used to describe him, “dum-dum” being one of the politer terms. Slim, however, recognises him for the gentle giant he is, and is the only person who understands George’s anguish at the end.

This remains one of the most humane novels I have ever read. If I were in charge of anything these days, I’d be compelling young people to read it rather than shielding them from it.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak

Each time I return to Jane Austen’s 1813 masterpiece, and I must have read it a dozen times, I notice and smile at things I haven’t noticed before. Take the pithy, one sentence account of the Bennet marriage: “Her father captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her”. Then, at the end of the novel, comes real poignancy when Mr Bennet says to his daughter of the proposed marriage he is doubtful about:  “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life”. Austen’s italics are very telling here.

Just in case you’ve been holidaying on Mars for the last 200 years, Pride and Prejudice is the story of an ill-matched Hertfordshire couple who have five daughters whom Mrs Bennet (a pitiful, tiresome, comic character) is determined to marry off as soon possible. The novel runs along on on-off possibilities between Jane and Bingley, Elizabeth and Darcy and Lydia and Wickham. Mr Collins, the cousin who stands to inherit the Bennet estate – another genius comic creation – marries Charlotte Lucas from the next estate because Elizabeth, understandably, won’t have him.

Of course there’s a happy ending which traditionally means marriage – three in this case. We close the book confident that Jane and Elizabeth will both be very contented married women. Lydia’s position is far more interesting because hers is a forced marriage triggered by a wedding-free elopement and, one presumes, a lot of hormones and lust. Wickham, gamester in constant debt and probably a womaniser, is most unsuitable marriage material and Lydia is barely sixteen. It will not go well.

Austen prose always sparkles but it glitters more brightly in Pride and Prejudice than it does anywhere else, partly because the novel is full of unforgettable characters. The outrageous, entitled vulgarity of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr Darcy’s aunt and Mr Collins’s patroness, for example, is perfectly done. So are some of the minor characters such as Sir William Lucas and Georgiana Darcy. No wonder this has always been the most popular of the six Jane Austen novels. And I’ve lost count of the number of different ways it has been dramatised.

I’ve come back to Pride and Prejudice now because it’s relevant to a new project I’m working on (you will probably hear more about this later in 2025) but, unsurprisingly, as soon as I read the first page, it became enjoyment rather than research and  I was entranced  – yet again. I’m sometimes asked to name a favourite book which would, for me, be absolutely impossible but this one would certainly have to be in my top ten.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck