The rather ambiguous point is Peri’s relationship with her husband. This is when the novel truly begins, the story taking a deep turn into controversial themes like Islam and feminism, topics that Peri could never explore at leisure in Turkey with her deeply religious mother and proclaimed secular father. But this is without a doubt a part of Shafak’s style, repeated in her some of her previous novels, The Forty Rules of Love, The Architect’s Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul.Īs Peri reveals through flashbacks her years at Oxford, her budding friendship with two very different women and her growing admiration for Professor Azur, a controversial academic of divinity at Oxford whose course is much coveted and many times frowned upon by other scholars. In fact, there is more third-person narrative than dialogue, which of course slows down the action and makes the novel seem terribly slow at times. The dialogues are by no means fluid in the sense that could be described as quick and to-the-point conversations. If this seems a little bit much to take on, it perhaps might be in some parts. In addition, Peri’s education at Oxford coincides with the terrorist attacks of Septemwhich makes the references to Islam and religion all the more relevant. The truly absorbing part of the novel are the many debates sparked between the characters about religion, country, faith, God, love and feminism. Her actions oscillate between very meek to sometimes surprisingly aggressive.

What is revealed about Peri is that she is a true dichotomy. Shafak’s narrative fluctuates between Peri’s childhood, her college years at Oxford and the present, both in the incident with the tramp and then later, at the dinner party. Brushing aside her daughter’s protests, Peri gives chase to the tramp in an absolute refusal to allow that photo to be lost forever. But there is something in that bag that Peri treasures, a faded Polaroid of herself, two other girls and a man taken decades earlier in Oxford. Trying to make her way to an upscale dinner party held by a wealthy businessman and where her husband Adnan is waiting for her, Peri thinks fleetingly about life in Istanbul, about her duties as a wife and mother, and how different she had envisioned herself so many years ago.Īmid her reverie and the increasing traffic, Peri doesn’t see the tramp reaching in to steal her handbag from the backseat until it’s too late. Nazperi Nalbantoglu, or Peri to her friends, is enduring both the nightmarish bumper-to-bumper traffic in a crowded Istanbul street and the short-tempered comments of her teenage daughter Deniz. It all begins with a stolen knockoff Birkin bag in Elif Shafak’s new novel, Three Daughters of Eve.

The daughters of eve elif shafak