Three Daughters of Eve
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An Indie Next Pick
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
