It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who gives seminars about God. The scene is set for a romantic crisis. Fourteen years later, Peri has a violent encounter with a tramp that brings it all back.
Shafak is an international pin-up: Three Daughters of Eve is her tenth novel, but she’s also a founding member of a foreign affairs thinktank, has an active role at the World Economic Forum, defends gay rights and has been prosecuted by the Turkish government.
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