After the Flood: There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, reviewed

A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a mudlark, born on the banks of the Thames. After another 174 years that same droplet is found in a bottle in south-eastern Turkey to be used in the baptism of Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl.

Water is both the unifying image and the dominant concern of Elif Shafak’s gloriously expansive and intellectually rich There Are Rivers in the Sky. After a brief prologue in 7th-century BCE Mesopotamia, it consists of three strands. The first is that of Arthur Smith, a 19th-century working-class prodigy who, fascinated by the Assyrian exhibits in the British Museum, eventually decodes the Chaldean account of the Great Flood on the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, before leading archaeological expeditions to Nineveh.

The second strand concerns Narin and her family of Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious sect, denigrated as devil-worshippers by Christians and Muslims alike, and whose history, according to Narin’s grandmother, is one of ‘pain and persecution. Seventy-two times we have been massacred.’ A 73rd, at the hands of Islamic State, takes place during the novel.

The third strand focuses on Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who posits that water has a memory, a theory that has been widely derided, although not by Shafak, who offers several variations on the theme that ‘Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’

Each strand has a particular flavour. Arthur’s presents a vivid depiction of both the richness and squalor of mid-Victorian London, peopled by real-life figures such as Gladstone and Dickens (much more sympathetically portrayed than in recent works by Martin McDonagh and Zadie Smith).Narin’s