I don't think I liked this book quite as much as Shafak's debut, The Island of Missing Trees, but I still enjoyed this. It takes a while for the stories to intersect, but I didn't mind - getting insight into 1840s London, 2014 Turkey and Iraq, and 2018 London was really interesting, and I feel like I learned a lot. In some ways this is an incredibly heartbreaking story about religious persecution, classism, and the Western world stealing artifacts from indigenous cultures in the name of "preservation," and in other ways it's a beautiful story about curiosity, finding your life's purpose, and being connected to your heritage and culture. At times the history felt heavy-handed, but I ultimately found it illuminating enough to capture my attention.

However, I didn't love that we got more chapters of Arthur's perspective than we did of Narin's and Zaleekah's - the narrative did address how Arthur thought he was entitled to take artifacts from the Mesopotamians and how he had the racist belief that Britain was better qualified to take care of artifacts than the people that created them, but giving him so much air time felt counterintuitive to what the novel was trying to communicate (or, at least what I thought the novel was trying to communicate).