Translated by Hande Zapsu. — New York: Viking, 2011. — 114 p. An acclaimed Turkish novelist's personal account of balancing a writer's life with a mother's life. After the birth of her first child in 2006, Turkish writer Elif Shafak suffered from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. Infused with guilt, anxiety, and bewilderment about whether she...
Elif Shafak begins her new novel with a dedication containing a dark and portentous anecdote: when she was seven years old, she lived next door to a tailor who was in the habit of beating his wife. "In the evenings, we listened to the shouts, the cries, the swearing. In the morning, we went on with our lives as usual. The entire neighbourhood pretended not to have heard, not to...
Viking Adult, 2010. Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent – and suddenly her life is transformed. Her first assignment is to read a novel about the ancient Sufi mystic, Rumi, who was transformed by the whirling dervish into a passionate poet and advocate of love. Slowly she realizes that his...
Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent – and suddenly her life is transformed. Her first assignment is to read a novel about the ancient Sufi mystic, Rumi, who was transformed by the whirling dervish into a passionate poet and advocate of love. Slowly she realizes that his thirteenth-century life is...
On a spring evening in Istanbul, Peri is on her way to a dinner party - a night of luxury a far cry from her upbringing. But when her handbag is stolen her world shifts violently. She starts to doubt how she got here: a traumatic Istanbul childhood, student years in Oxford, the rebellious professor who led her and best friends Shirin and Mona to question everything - Islam,...
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