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.

In Yazidi Creation and Flood myths, humanity descends from Adam alone and the serpent is a saviour

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.