10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Leila, nicknamed Tequila Leila by the found family who loves her, has just been killed and left in a bin outside Istanbul when the novel opens, and Shafak spends its first and strangest section inside the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds neuroscience suggests brain activity can persist after clinical death, using that window to let one memory surface for each additional minute, each keyed to a specific taste or smell, cardamom coffee, lemon and sugar, sea salt, rather than to chronological order. The structure lets Shafak build Leila's entire biography, a childhood in the eastern city of Van inside a household with two mothers and a domineering father, abuse by an uncle, flight to Istanbul and eventual work in a brothel, out of sensation rather than plot, so that a life spent being reduced to her body by nearly everyone in it is, in its final minutes, finally narrated through that same body on its own terms.

The five friends who anchor the novel's second half, Sinan, a childhood friend who never stopped loving her; Nalan, a transgender woman and former villager who reinvented herself in Istanbul before Leila arrived; Jameelah, trafficked from Somalia into the same brothel; Zaynab, a devout, superstitious dwarf who works as the brothel's fortune-teller; and Humeyra, a singer who fled an abusive marriage, function as the deliberate opposite of Leila's biological family, who disowned her outright once she began sex work. Shafak calls this arrangement, repeatedly, a family of choice, and builds the novel's entire second half around what that family is willing to risk, physically and legally, to give Leila the burial her actual relatives refuse to claim.

Istanbul's Kimsesizler Mezarlığı, the real cemetery where the city buries its unclaimed and unwanted dead under numbered markers rather than names, becomes Shafak's sharpest image for what the novel is actually arguing against: a society that will process someone like Leila in life, as a body to be used, and then in death, as a number to be filed, without a name attached at either end. The friends' insistence on retrieving her from that anonymity is not sentimental in Shafak's telling, it is the novel's whole argument made physical, that dignity has to be actively claimed back from a system built to withhold it by default.