There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak

I have been a fan of this author since reading her fist book--her weaving of history from her homeland of Turkey into her stories, and the complexity of controversies there make for excellent reading. This one is tied to the Kurds and her Turkish homeland but starts in ancient Sumeria (which is more like Iraq, but includes home to Kurds). It is also tied to the universality of water, that it is constantly recycled and falls again, connecting us across centuries. It starts with King Ashurbanipal (mid-600s BCE), the legendary leader of the wealthiest empire in the world, last of the great rulers of the kingdom of Assyria.. He rules Ninevah, on the banks of a tributary of the Tigris River called Khosr, and amasses a mammoth library of more than 7,000 tablets written in cuneiform--the clay is long lasting, and so once the code was cracked, their history was both preserved and knowable. His favorite volume is the ancient flood myth The Epic of Gilgamesh. Then there is Arthur, born into staggering poverty in 1840's London. He cannot receive the schooling he craves but possesses a superlative memory. He’s fascinated by books and, above all, by Ninevah. Through a mix of luck, talent, and grit, he finds work at a printer’s office, which ultimately leads him to the British Museum. With his gift for decoding ancient stone tablets, he eventually makes his way to the Middle East to study them--he is almost thwarted in his quest to find the final tablet of the flood story by, you guessed it, a flood, this one man made. Arthur is based on real-life British Assyriologist George Smith [1840-1876], who was obsessed with and decoded the Epic of Gilgamesh. Finally there are Kurds in modern times--one in London and a Yaziki girl in Iraq who's village is about to be flooded by a dam--the story spans millennia, and there is the persistent presence a water and the power it holds. This is a great tale well told--even if you are not a student of ancient civilizations.