New Perspectives about the Human Condition: Reviews of The Island of Missing Trees and forthcoming Etna

The Overstory meets Exit West in this beautifully layered, nuanced novel from British-Turkish writer, Elif Shafak. The Island of Missing Trees has deep reverence of the natural world and the spectacular flora and fauna who inhabit it, seamlessly shifting back and forth in time to tell the story not just of two forbidden lovers but of a very special fig tree and the island she originated from.

Shafak writes beautifully and knows how to structure a story. The fig tree’s observations about humans are eye-opening—sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying, but always astute and authentic. And it hits differently, these observations, coming from the tree, as opposed to a human narrator sharing the same thoughts. The fig tree muses about the history of Cyprus; a particularly memorable passage was about “the Green Line”, or the made-up border that partitions the island, separating the Greeks from the Turks. I came to this novel with very limited knowledge about the history of Cyprus or the centuries’ long conflict between the Greeks and the Turks and I finished this novel having learned quite a bit.

Buy This Book

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Paul Yoon’s forthcoming Etna is a slim novel that can be read in a day and that’s probably exactly what you’ll do. Told from the perspective of a former military dog trained to sniff out bombs, Etna, like the humans he encounters, is trying to find home and must journey through a war-torn landscape to do so. It was really something to be reading this while our country engages in an unlawful war of aggression against Iran. The world through Etna’s eyes lays bare the devastating flaws in the human approach to resolving differences, personal and territorial, and the price that everyday people—who have no say over when the fighting stops, or begins—pay when those in power decide to go to war.

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How do we rebuild our lives after we lose everything? In both of these novels, the

resilient human spirit is on full display—yet I continually found myself wondering: What

is WRONG with people? The humans Etna encounters as he traverses this fictional,

war-torn country, are attempting to start over, again. And then when inevitable decisions

are made by powerful men, tucked safely away from harm, that peacetime is over, these

people will have to endure and, if they survive, find themselves in the position to

rebuild—again.

The Island of Missing Trees is on our shelves now, and available on our new online store. Etna comes out August 4, 2026, so mark your calendar. Whether we will still be engaged in an illegal war with Iran when Etna is released remains to be seen. Even if we are not, war will be happening elsewhere—it seems to be the human condition.