Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION SHA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION SHA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION SHA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION SHA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Architect's Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul .
Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground--an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past--and a love--Peri had tried desperately to forget.
Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as Peri arrives at the party and navigates the tensions that simmer in this crossroads country between East and West, religious and secular, rich and poor. Over the course of the dinner, and amidst an opulence that is surely ill-begotten, terrorist attacks occur across the city. Competing in Peri's mind however are the memories invoked by her almost-lost polaroid, of the time years earlier when she was sent abroad for the first time, to attend Oxford University. As a young woman there, she had become friends with the charming, adventurous Shirin, a fully assimilated Iranian girl, and Mona, a devout Egyptian-American. Their arguments about Islam and feminism find focus in the charismatic but controversial Professor Azur, who teaches divinity, but in unorthodox ways. As the terrorist attacks come ever closer, Peri is moved to recall the scandal that tore them all apart.
Elif Shafak is the number one bestselling novelist in her native Turkey, and her work is translated and celebrated around the world. In Three Daughters of Eve , she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world.
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 (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 encounter with a vagrant on the streets in Istanbul. She escapes, but when a photograph of her with her two university friends, Shirin and Mona, falls out of her purse during the struggle, it leads her to reminisce. She thinks back to her days at Oxford when she met Shirin, a vivacious, popular student. Peri decided to take a class with Shirin's beloved mentor, professor Anthony Azur, who teaches a seminar about God. Azur inspires love, hate, and obsession among his students and colleagues, and Peri soon falls for him, eventually causing a rift between her and her friends. The novel's debate on the nature of God presents opposing viewpoints through the various characters: Shirin, like Peri's father, becomes an atheist, while Peri's roommate Mona brandishes a different kind of feminist-tinged Muslim devotion than Peri's zealous mother, and various students at the seminar voice their opinions along with Azur. Pronouncements from newly awakened college kids in Azur's class sometimes tip into tedium. Events jarringly come out of left field as current-day Peri tries to reconcile with Shirin and Azur, and the narrative itself ends abruptly. But readers interested in debates about the nature of God will find the book intriguing. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When Nazperi Nalbantoglu, called Peri, travels to Oxford from Istanbul to attend school in 2000, she carries the weight of her father's expectations. Mensur is determined that his only daughter will become a forward-thinking idealist. Torn between her strictly observant mother, Selma, and her more progressive father, Peri is unsure about religion. It is with this baggage that she meets the other two daughters of Eve: Shirin, a British woman of Iranian descent, and Mona, an observant Muslim of Egyptian ancestry. Peri is also worryingly drawn to Professor Azur, who challenges her assumptions about God and religion. Renowned Turkish writer Shafak (Honor, 2013) switches back and forth between Peri's Oxford days and her life in 2016 Istanbul, as a fine modern Muslim. A thinly veiled meditation on the complexities of religion, this tale wears its agenda overtly, while the characters often come across as caricatures, each a stand-in for a certain point of view. Despite a bit of heavy-handedness here, Shafak is a brilliant chronicler of the ills that plague contemporary society and once again proves her mettle.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CUBA ON THE VERGE Edited by Leila Guerriero. (Ecco, $26.99.) Twelve writers explore this moment of transition in a post-Castro Cuba, as it manifests in music, art and even baseball, the landmark julius caesar Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub. (Pantheon, $50.) This tome brings together all the written works of the statesman and military commander, ft's mostly a series of accounts of wars he waged, from the Gallic War to the African War, which turned the Roman republic into an empire, should the tent be burning like that? By Bill Heavey. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) A suburban dad who loves hunting and fishing, Heavey has been writing a column for Field & Stream for over two decades, and this collection ranges from a deer archery hunt to the time he crashed a 44-foot houseboat in Florida. Christopher hitchens: the last interview (Melville House, $15.99.) The always provocative Christopher Hitchens died six years ago, but his presence can still be felt. As part of its "Last Interview" series, Melville House pulls together some of Hitchens's greatest dialogues, each sparkling with intelligence and wit. three daughters of eve By Elif Shafak. (Bloomsbury, $27.) Shafak's novel takes place over the course of a dinner party in Istanbul on a night when terrorist attacks occur across the city. Through her main character, a wealthy socialite, Shafak, one of Turkey's most acclaimed authors, explores the many tensions that exist in a society struggling toward modernity. "I recently decided to read Cormac McCarthy's first three novels. This was, to understate it, an odd decision for this time of year. The world is bedecked in white lights, and my brain is filled with misshapen things. The books are by turns brilliant and exasperating, the orchard keeper, McCarthy's 1965 debut, involves two men, one of them a whiskey bootlegger, and a boy, connected in ways that are often willfully incomprehensible. The novel's who-what-when-where is a house deep in the woods with its lights out. His third book, child of god, is a far easier read; syntactically, at least. Its contents are grislier though, involving a deeply disturbed man-child who is described, on Page 4, as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps." That sentence becomes the book's central provocation as the man misunderstands, murders and defiles several people along his life's blind path. I'm halfway through his second, outer dark, as I write this. It involves a woman's search for her lost newborn, the product of an incestuous relationship with her brother. Happy Holidays!" - JOHN WILLIAMS, DAILY BOOKS EDITOR AND STAFF WRITER, ON WHAT HE'S READING.
Guardian Review
A young Muslim woman's spiritual quest takes her from Istanbul to Oxford as she learns about love, faith and real life There is a compelling confidence about the scope of Elif Shafak 's work. 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. Her new novel is no exception. 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. The reader is immediately alerted both to Peri's standing as a "fine modern Muslim" and to the cracks in that appearance. Today, the narrator warns us, Peri will confront "the void in her soul". The plot wastes little time in beginning that journey into the void; Peri is subjected to a robbery and an attempted rape. Yet the attack seems to have less importance for Peri than an event arising from it. 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". 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. Indeed, we come to understand Peri above all through her relationships. She is one of those intriguing, if frustrating, characters who finds it almost impossible to nail her colours to the mast. "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. 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. The three women together make up the Three Daughters of Eve, or, as Shafak puts it, the sinner, the believer and the confused. Fans of Shafak's work will find echoes of her previous novels here. From her childhood, Peri is fascinated by the meaning of divinity, and at Oxford she falls under the spell of a charismatic teacher, Azur, who runs a course on understanding God. These heartfelt theological discussions seem to be continuing debates that began in earlier books such as The Forty Rules of Love. There are Shafak's trademark touches of magical realism in this book, too, as Peri experiences intermittent visions of a baby in a mist, who brings her into contact with a spiritual world that can be both comforting and unsettling. While continuing to explore spiritual themes, Shafak has become more adept at grounding her work in the real world While continuing to explore spiritual themes, Shafak has become more adept at grounding her work in the real world. She is skilled at capturing the constraints as well as the pleasures of femininity: "Whether driving or walking, a woman did best to keep her gaze unfocused and turned inward, as if peering into distant memories." And the dangers of religious extremism and political repression have personal impact for Peri. In one of the most heartfelt scenes, she learns of her imprisoned brother's torture in the most visceral way, seeing the bloodstains on the back of his prison uniform as he turns to leave the visitors' room. The whole novel is marvellously rich in intention. Why, then, does it sometimes falter in execution? The centre of the story rests on Peri's relationship with the teacher at Oxford who pushes his students into deeper and deeper inquiries into the nature of God. Shafak seems to intend this as a vital erotic and intellectual awakening, but Azur comes across as arrogant and even deluded about his own brilliance, so Peri's wholehearted adoration for him fails to convince. And while Shafak's language shows no shortage of aplomb, sometimes it drifts into cliche: eyes flash like "balls of fire", or give an "icy stare". Some scenes, too, are rather flat, such as the dinner party that threads through the novel. Despite such caveats, as this complex heroine moves from Istanbul to Oxford and back again, as she jumps from surreal visions into inevitable compromise with real life, as she moves from compliance towards anger and finally understanding, there is an unflagging energy to her story. Perhaps because there is so much at stake for her that might be at stake for the reader, too, her dilemmas and desires seem to persist even after the novel is ended. - Natasha Walter.
Kirkus Review
Through the story of a cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class Turkish woman coming to terms with her life, Shafak (The Architect's Apprentice, 2015, etc.) meshes many of the themes she has explored separately in her previous novels: Turkish politics, spiritualism, and the uneasy relationship between East and West.In 2016 Istanbul, 35-year-old Peri is en route with her surly 12-year-old daughter to a dinner party when a beggar tries to rob her. As Peri successfully fights off her attacker (possibly with help from a guardian angel), an old photograph falls from her purse, a forgotten Polaroid of Peri standing with three others at Oxford. That photograph continues to tug at her memories when she eventually arrives at the dinner party, a party that may remind film aficionados of Buuel's The Exterminating Angel. As course after course is served in the ostentatiously beautiful home, Peri observes her well-heeled fellow guests while she reconsiders her past. She spent an unhappy childhood caught in the cross hairs between her protective, devout mother and her heavy-drinking but adored secularist father, an Atatrk devotee. Unable to decide what she believed, bookworm Peri searched for a path between belief and disbelief. Supported by her father, she attended Oxford in 2000; her intellectual, spiritual, and emotional lives there centered on the others in that photograph: Egyptian-American Mona, a Muslim feminist who wore her headscarf as a choice; Shirin, an aggressively secular, joyful Iranian; and professor Azur, whose controversial course, "Entering the Mind of God/God of the Mind," had a profound effect on all his students and especially inspired but confused Peri. In 2016, listening to self-absorbed dinner-party chatter expressing a cross-section of Turkish attitudes about nationalism, capitalism, and Islam, Peri decides to face the act of betrayal she committed at Oxford before it's too late. Shafak's infectious, earnest exuberance is used here to better effect than it has been recently; her portrait of a woman in existential crisis feels universal, shining clarifying light on Islamand religious spirituality in generalwithin the frame of today's world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Three Muslim women, Shirin, Mona, and Peri, meet in a philosophy class at Oxford University and end up sharing a home and a desire to investigate their divergent perspectives on God and Islam. Though Mona and Shirin are proudly opinionated, the focus is on Peri, the more nuanced thinker. A sensitive child, aware of the rift between her secular father and devout mother, she has always grappled with the nature of God. Her quest for understanding leads from Turkey to England and to controversial Professor Azur, known for eschewing the rules and promising to rid his students of the "malady of certainty." The charismatic Azur delights in pitting students against one another, challenging their core beliefs, and forcing a calamitous reaction that reverberates for years. A decade later, Peri is back in Istanbul, a wife and mother still uncertain and burdened with the memory of a time she failed to stand up for her convictions. VERDICT Nominated for the Orange and Baileys Prizes and IPAC Dublin Literary Award, Turkish author Shafak uses rich, thought-provoking prose to illuminate women's struggles and fuse Islam with feminist theory. Like her compatriot Orhan Pamuk, Shafak illustrates the ongoing fissure between Eastern and Western culture in Turkey. [See Prepub Alert, 6/26/17.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
