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.
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