Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
