Mediterraneanism Meets Global Ethics: A Poetic and Material Analysis of The Island of Missing Trees

ABSTRACT This article delves into discussions around the global novel through a poetic and material analysis of The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by British‐Turkish writer Elif Shafak. Internationally acclaimed, the novel's central plot is a love story set in 1974 Nicosia (Cyprus) between Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, who secretly meet amidst the political violence of a divided city, against the backdrop of golden beaches, climbing bougainvilleas, and stuffed vine leaves. I argue that the narrative tension between locality and globality mediated by a cosmopolitan writer like Shafak is one of the fundamental strategies for the novel's global legibility, circulation, and reception. First, I analyze its narrative strategies—articulated through multiple points of view (including that of a fig tree), a multiscale narrative construction (temporal, spatial, but also non‐human), and a picturesque production of the local (Cypriot) and the regional (Mediterranean)—to problematize the mechanisms of internationalization in the novel. Second, I question how the novel thematically participates in popular global discourses such as humanitarianism or environmentalism. Finally, I consider the circulation and reception assumptions around the novel in Western English‐language media.