Made with good intentions, reflecting the author’s worldview that celebrates diversity above all other virtues, the book nevertheless fails to live up to its promises. (In 2006, her novel The Bastard of Istanbul was taken to court on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” The book mentions the Armenian genocide.) Her latest Three Daughters of Eve has religion at its core, a topic that remains relevant in present-day Turkey. Şafak urges the reader to see beyond parochial preconceptions with her disparate characters, some of whose stories defy national historiography. Peri hangs in the middle between the two – doubtful about espousing either of their convictions.Īlthough sometimes set in a historical backdrop, Elif Şafak’s novels tackle contemporary issues including identity, feminism and multiculturalism. The story then moves back in time to introduce two other “daughters of Eve” who, like Peri, were students in Oxford: one of them a pious Muslim from Egypt and the other an atheist from Iran. It doesn’t look like a milieu she had dreamed of ending up in something gnaws at her throughout the night. The book centers around a female main character, Peri, who goes to a fancy dinner party among a moneyed group of people in Istanbul. I had the same motivation when I set out to read Elif Şafak’s latest novel, Three Daughters of Eve. You lift your head up from the book, and it is in your own musings that the story continues to unfold. Then there are books that interrupt your reading, not out of boredom or disinterest but due precisely to the richness that brims over the words on the page. There are books you can’t put down: delightful page-turners that take you on a thrilling rollercoaster ride, devoured in one sitting.

Roland Barthes – The Pleasure of the Text “It produces in me the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” Review: Three Daughters of Eve, Elif Şafak By Merve Pehlivan

Elif shafak daughters of eve