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Summary
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist
A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak.
In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.
In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.
Author Notes
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist. She has published 19 books, 12 of which are novels, including her latest The Island of Missing Trees , shortlisted for the Costa Award, RSL Ondaatje Prize and Women's Prize for Fiction. She is a bestselling author in many countries around the world and her work has been translated into 55 languages. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize and was Blackwell's Book of the Year. The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by BBC among the 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK. She also holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. Shafak contributes to major publications around the world and she was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Recently, Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to 'the renewal of the art of storytelling'. www.elifshafak.com
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 body thrown into a dumpster. Though her heart stops beating, her brain continues to function for the 10 minutes and 38 seconds of the title, as she is jolted back to the settings of her most graphic memories. Leila, it turns out, grew up in a rural Turkish town, where she was separated from her mother in infancy. Sexually abused by her uncle and threatened with an arranged marriage, teenage Leila took off to Istanbul, where the only work she could find was in the sex trade. Leila is a lively character, and her life, particularly in Istanbul, isn't unrelentingly bleak. The narrative opens up in surprising ways when Leila's five best friends, all outcasts like herself whose pasts are detailed in the book, decide to rescue her body from the "Cemetery of the Companionless," where it has been unceremoniously buried. This is a vividly realized and complicated portrait of a woman making a life for herself in grueling circumstances, and of the labyrinthine city in which she does so. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
The latest novel by an author under attack from the Turkish government is a profound and unflinching look at sexual violence It's a source of great irony and outrage that the Turkish authorities have decided to investigate Elif Shafak for writing about sexual violence just as her latest novel, a profound, humanising narrative about the victims of sexual violence, is being published in Turkey and elsewhere. It starts with an explosive premise, as we dive into the mind of sex worker "Tequila Leila", who is dying in a rubbish bin on the outskirts of Istanbul. As her brain begins to shut down, Leila, assuming the roles of digressive raconteur and her own biographer, goes back in time to trace the story of the little girl from the provinces who ends up as a two-column crime story in the city's newspapers. She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she had believed to be lost for ever. Time became fluid, a free flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable. Thus begins an extraordinary tale of a brutalised, broken but profoundly courageous woman who retains her humanity despite a world bent on crushing her at every turn. We see beautifully rendered, tender vignettes of her early life, as she remembers her birth and childhood in the house of well-to-do tailor Haroun, who has been waiting a long time for offspring from his two wives. As a free-spirited girl, Leila soon discovers that almost everything in life is either forbidden to her or predetermined by age-old familial codes. Early in the novel, having captured the minutiae of domestic and social life in the eastern province of Van, Shafak recounts a hair-raising scene when Leila is six, during a family picnic at a beachside hotel. It's this harrowing incident, almost unbearable to witness, that turns out to be the pivot around which young Leila's life turns. We are then hurled into the brutal realities of life in the city. "Istanbul was an illusion. A magician's trick gone wrong." For more than half the book, the reader is guided by Leila's vibrant but soon to be extinguished memory, each reminiscence sparked by a smell or taste. It's a terrific device, taking us from the rubbish bin to a day in her childhood when she is banned by her pious father from playing with a hula hoop. We are also transported to the grand opening of the Bosphorus Bridge, which a grown-up Leila witnesses alongside a sea of proud Istanbulis, including the activist and artist who becomes her only true love and husband. A picture of Leila's life, as well as that of her despondent and downtrodden mother, emerges from this buzzing, chaotic narrative. After a series of debilitating miscarriages, Leila's mother gives birth to a baby girl, only to be instantly deprived of her joy when her husband decrees that his first wife is to be the mother of this child, and she will be only an aunt, because "you can always have more babies". In her youth and middle years, Leila is subjected to unspeakable cruelties in the metropolis, and Shafak does something remarkable here. She infuses Leila's personality with heart and soul and surrounds her with a set of "undesirables", five friends whose characters are sketched with beauty and pain. By revealing layer upon layer of her interior life, the novel draws a magnificently nuanced portrait of its protagonist. The dreamy girl from Van who refuses to be silent even when murdered becomes the conscience of "this manic old city". Shafak takes a piercing, unflinching look at the trauma women's minds and bodies are subjected to in a social system defined by patriarchal codes. It's a brutal book, bleak and relentless in its portrayal of violence, heartbreak and grief, but ultimately life-affirming. Here, as in Shafak's previous work, we find the good old-fashioned art of intricate storytelling, something I miss sometimes in modern fiction. The mad, exhilarating final section, in which Leila is a corpse being driven away from the "cemetery of the companionless" by her friends, is a testament to Shafak's brilliance as a storyteller. People in Turkey and elsewhere should celebrate her work.
Kirkus Review
In a novel circling a murdered woman's last moments as she recalls key incidents from her life, Shafak (The Three Daughters of Eve, 2017, etc.) highlights Turkish society's treatment of women and outsiders.Tequila Leila, a middle-aged sex worker, lingers at the border between life and death inside a metal garbage can on the fringes of Istanbulto which Turkish-born Shafak has written a highly ambivalent love letter; lyrical prose embraces the sensual, sordid, and corrupt city she no longer visits for political reasons. Speaking of sensual, Leila's final minutes are structured around remembered tastes, from the salt on her skin as a newborn to the single malt whiskey sipped with her last customer before recklessly getting into a car with strangers. The flavor of watermelon returns her to a childhood complicated by confusion over her birth mother's identity and irreparably damaged by an uncle's repeated sexual abuse beginning when she was 6 in 1953. In 1963 Leila faced an arranged marriage while mourning her younger brother's death, events associated with goat stew. Instead she ran 1,000 miles away from her hometown to Istanbul and was quickly trapped into prostitution. More taste memories follow her life as a sex worker as well as her happy marriage to a leftist artist, cut short by his death during a protest march. Tastes also represent the five friends central to Leila's life and their individual stories of being mistreated, victimized, and/or made to feel invisible. Sexual abuse, political corruption, and religious fundamentalists' intolerance have been the tropes in so many Shafak novels that her outrage here, however heartfelt, feels shopworn. And her plotting can be overwrought. Yet Shafak's ability to create empathy for her cast of sex workers and social outcasts can be irresistible, especially when a character is allowed more complexity, like Leila's oldest friend, Sinan, who hid his love for Leila until her death.An uneven mix of charm, melodrama, polemics, and clich that doesn't represent the prolific Shafak at her best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Leila cannot believe that she's been murdered and dumped in a trash bin on the shadowy edge of Istanbul. Ever-courageous Turkish writer Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve, 2017) creates another resilient woman protagonist at odds with Turkey's repressive society in this Man Booker shortlist title, though, in irrepressible Leila, Shafak raises her literary dissent to a new level. The first half of this seductively imaginative, rambunctiously humorous, complexly tragic, and lyrically redemptive tale presents Leila's tough life in enrapturing and enraging flashbacks as her brain lights up with a final 10-minute-and-38-second surge of memories, from the cruel betrayal of her mother, a tyrannized second wife, to the sexual abuse that finally induces Leila to run away to Istanbul, where she finds some safety and love in a brothel. Leila also remembers her five beloved friends Sinan, her childhood ally; Nalan, a trans woman; Jameelah, a trafficked Somalian; Zaynab, a dwarf and fortune-teller; and Humeyra, a singer who fled domestic violence. This band of squabbling, traumatized, loyal, witty, and heroic outcasts carry the story forward as they seek Leila's grave in the grim Cemetery of the Companionless. Shafak's motley and compassionate cast embodies both the brutal consequences of tyranny and the power of individuals to undermine it in a full-tilt novel set in a fabled city, a swirling microcosm of human complexity and paradox.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
