The three women together make up the Three Daughters of Eve, or, as Shafak puts it, the sinner, the believer and the confused.įans of Shafak’s work will find echoes of her previous novels here. When she gets to Oxford University her two best female friends are the sensual, confident Iranian-born Shirin, and the modest, religious Egyptian-American Mona. “While some people were passionate believers and others passionate non-believers, she would always remain stuck in between.” Throughout her childhood in Istanbul Peri is rocked by the conflict between her irreligious, heavy-drinking father on the one hand, and her devout, resentful mother on the other. She is one of those intriguing, if frustrating, characters who finds it almost impossible to nail her colours to the mast. Indeed, we come to understand Peri above all through her relationships. The rest of the novel, which travels backwards through her life and forwards through the evening to come, is devoted to excavating the importance of that photograph, and exploring her thwarted relationships with the people in the picture. During the struggle, a photograph of Peri, with two other women and a man in Oxford, falls out of her bag: Peri “flinched as though the photo were alive and might have been hurt in the fall”. Yet the attack seems to have less importance for Peri than an event arising from it. The plot wastes little time in beginning that journey into the void Peri is subjected to a robbery and an attempted rape. Today, the narrator warns us, Peri will confront “the void in her soul”. The reader is immediately alerted both to Peri’s standing as a “fine modern Muslim” and to the cracks in that appearance.

We begin with middle-aged Peri and her teenage daughter Deniz stuck in a traffic jam in Istanbul in 2016 as they make their way to a dinner party. As a writer who stands between west and east, working in Turkish and English, living in Istanbul and London, she engages with some of the most pressing political and personal themes of our times. T here is a compelling confidence about the scope of Elif Shafak’s work.

Elif shafak 3 daughters of eve