![]() Unable to decide what she believed, bookworm Peri searched for a path between belief and disbelief. She spent an unhappy childhood caught in the cross hairs between her protective, devout mother and her heavy-drinking but adored secularist father, an Atatürk devotee. As course after course is served in the ostentatiously beautiful home, Peri observes her well-heeled fellow guests while she reconsiders her past. That photograph continues to tug at her memories when she eventually arrives at the dinner party, a party that may remind film aficionados of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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