The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on their shared island home and develop a forbidden love. A fig tree in the taverna witnesses their secret meetings and, later, their departures as war breaks out and the capital is destroyed. Decades later, Kostas returns to the island as a botanist searching for native species, though he is really seeking his lost love. Years later, a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited and to her family's troubled history. As Ada works to untangle years of secrets, she seeks to understand her complex identity and find her place in the world. The novel explores themes of love, division, transcendence, history, and ecological consciousness through the interconnected stories of these characters and the tree that connects them across time and geography.