Three Daughters of Eve - Elif Shafak

"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."

I have read Shafak's work before, more specifically her much acclaimed Bastard of Istanbul. However, while I was blown away of the Bastard of Istanbul's prose, I was left wanting when it came to plot. Three Daughters of Eve was far better in my personal opinion. This might be because the themes discussed, such as loneliness, religion and finding yourself stuck between cultures where far closer to my heart than the family estrangement depicted in Bastard of Istanbul. 

Three Daughters of Eve is a multi-layered novel that explores the feeling of being caught in between the tensions that plague the modern era - between traditionalism and modernity, between religiosity and secularism, between East and West - and the consequences of being ideologically unmoored in a polarized world. While Three Daughters of Eve succeeds in scaling down these lofty ideas into the ways they shape the everyday life of the protagonist, it also uses the rest of its characters as caricatures of these ideas, turning moments of potentially genuine connection into staged battlegrounds where the clash between dichotomies can play out. While this should have led to the characters feeling one dimensional and unrelatable, through Shafak's beautiful writing, I still related to them despite understanding what they represented on a textual level.  I enjoyed the novel for the author's skill in evoking time and place, and her depiction of the modern existential crisis that went beyond the individual and into society as a whole, while still being deeply personal. I truly related to Peri and her struggles in finding herself. 

I also adored Shafak's prose. She has a certain style that is both poetic and raw, never feeling overly florid. She cuts through human nature and it's condition in short sharp sentences, displaying a dizzying love for both Turkey and England. 

My only negative to this book is that I couldn’t help but feel that, in some places, there were build ups to scenes that were abruptly abandoned. I was also dissatisfied with the rather abrupt ending although I understood the point the author was trying to make. 

Age Rating 15+ Nothing untoward, though there is a mugging and attempted rape at the beginning.