Books by Elif Shafak and Complete Book Reviews
Elif Shafak, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $25 (368p) ISBN 978-0-374-25357-8
Three graduate school roommates—a Moroccan, a Turk and a Spaniard—are strange bedfellows in a potentially inhospitable land in this painstakingly multicultural but rather discombobulated first novel in English by Shafak, a prize winner...
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Elif Shafak, Author ; trans. from the Turkish by Brendan Freely. Marion Boyars $14.95 (264p) ISBN 978-0-7145-3121-2
Originally published in Turkey in 1999 to wide acclaim, this screwball love story is Shafak's third novel. (Her fifth, The Saint of Incipient Insanities
, was published here in 2004.) Loosely organized around a neurotic obese woman and a feisty...
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Elif Shafak, Author . Viking $24.95 (360p) ISBN 978-0-670-03834-3
In her second novel written in English (The Saint of Incipient Insanities
was the first), Turkish novelist Shafak tackles Turkish national identity and the Armenian "question" in her signature style. In a novel that overflows with a kitchen
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Elif Shafak, Author . Viking $25.95 (354p) ISBN 978-0-670-02145-1
Celebrated Turkish novelist Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul
) serves up a curious blend of mediocre hen lit and epic historical to underwhelming results. In present-day Boston, dull suburban mother and cheated-on wife Ella Rubinstein takes a job as...
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Elif Shafak. Viking, $26.95 (342p) ISBN 978-0-670-78483-7
Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul) grips the reader from the opening page when, in 1992, Iskender Toprek is finally released from an English prison, to be picked up by his sister Esma. As Esma narrates the shifts in time, space, and perspective, it is
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Elif Shafak. Viking, $27.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-525-42797-1
Shafak's (The Bastard of Istanbul) rambling historical epic weaves its way through the rule of three sultans in 16th-century Istanbul. Twelve-year-old Jahan arrives in the city alone except for an important gift for the Sultan that he has been...
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Elif Shafak, trans. from the Turkish by Hande Zapsu. Viking, $25.95 (270p) ISBN 978-0-670-02264-9
Feeling conflicted about embarking on motherhood, Turkish novelist Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love) chronicles the cruel, crazy trajectory that took her from feminist single novelist to married nursing mother of two. An accomplished writer by her...
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Elif Shafak. Bloomsbury, $27 (384p) ISBN 978-1-63286-995-1
Shafak’s ambitious novel (after The Architect’s Apprentice) follows Peri Nalbantoglu, namely her memories of childhood and a scandal in which she was involved long ago at Oxford. On her way to a dinner party in the present, Peri has a violent...
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Elif Shafak. Bloomsbury, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-63557-447-0
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize, this audacious, inventive novel by Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve) begins with the death of its protagonist and moves onward from there. An Istanbul prostitute known as “Tequila Leila” is murdered and her...
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Elif Shafak. Bloomsbury, $27 (368p) ISBN 978-1-63557-859-1
Booker-shortlisted Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World) amazes with this resonant story of the generational trauma of the Cypriot Civil War. Just before Christmas in the late 2010s, 16-year-old Ada Kazantzakis confounds her London...
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