The three daughters of Eve

Beri was on her way to a dinner party in Istanbul when a beggar blocked her way and snatched her handbag. And while she was struggling to retrieve her bag, a Polaroid picture fell from it showing three young women and their shining professor at Oxford University. It is a story about remnants of love that Beri desperately tried to forget; and about a strange friendship that brought together: Mona the believing Egyptian, Shirin the atheist Iranian, and Beri torn between a liberated father and a conservative mother. Shafak is one of the most important writers of novels in our time. Her recent remarkable work moves between Oxford and Istanbul, exploring in an astonishing way the relationship between faith and friendship, between poverty and wealth, and the terrifying clash between modernity and tradition. (Independent) Orhan Pamuk: Aylaf Shafak is the best among those who wrote novels in Turkey in this decade.