Three Lives Bound by Rivers in the Sky

On the banks of the Tigris in ancient Nineveh, Mesopotamia’s King Ashurbanipal—erudite and ruthless—builds a great library that collapses when his reign ends.

Out of those ruins survives the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that will seep into two rivers and draw three lives into the same current.

In 1840, Arthur is born beside the reeking, sewage-filled Thames in London; with an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, his remarkable memory is his sole escape from destitution,

carrying him into an apprenticeship at a major publisher where Nineveh and Its Remains seizes his attention.

In Turkey in 2014, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl facing a rare disorder that will soon deafen her, is hurried by her grandmother toward baptism in a sacred Iraqi temple while ISIS closes in and the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris are destroyed.

In 2018 London, newly divorced hydrologist Zaleekah, orphaned and raised by a wealthy uncle, takes a houseboat on the Thames to leave her husband behind, having resolved to end her life within a month—until a curious book about her homeland alters that course.