de Elif Shafak
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist
A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak.
In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.
In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist
A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak.
In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.
In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.
Critiques-
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Starred review from October 7, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize, this audacious, inventive novel by Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve) begins with the death of its protagonist and moves onward from there. An Istanbul prostitute known as “Tequila Leila” is murdered and her body thrown into a dumpster. Though her heart stops beating, her brain continues to function for the 10 minutes and 38 seconds of the title, as she is jolted back to the settings of her most graphic memories. Leila, it turns out, grew up in a rural Turkish town, where she was separated from her mother in infancy. Sexually abused by her uncle and threatened with an arranged marriage, teenage Leila took off to Istanbul, where the only work she could find was in the sex trade. Leila is a lively character, and her life, particularly in Istanbul, isn’t unrelentingly bleak. The narrative opens up in surprising ways when Leila’s five best friends, all outcasts like herself whose pasts are detailed in the book, decide to rescue her body from the “Cemetery of the Companionless,” where it has been unceremoniously buried. This is a vividly realized and complicated portrait of a woman making a life for herself in grueling circumstances, and of the labyrinthine city in which she does so. -
November 1, 2019
In a novel circling a murdered woman's last moments as she recalls key incidents from her life, Shafak (The Three Daughters of Eve, 2017, etc.) highlights Turkish society's treatment of women and outsiders. Tequila Leila, a middle-aged sex worker, lingers at the border between life and death inside a metal garbage can on the fringes of Istanbul--to which Turkish-born Shafak has written a highly ambivalent love letter; lyrical prose embraces the sensual, sordid, and corrupt city she no longer visits for political reasons. Speaking of sensual, Leila's final minutes are structured around remembered tastes, from the salt on her skin as a newborn to the single malt whiskey sipped with her last customer before recklessly getting into a car with strangers. The flavor of watermelon returns her to a childhood complicated by confusion over her birth mother's identity and irreparably damaged by an uncle's repeated sexual abuse beginning when she was 6 in 1953. In 1963 Leila faced an arranged marriage while mourning her younger brother's death, events associated with goat stew. Instead she ran 1,000 miles away from her hometown to Istanbul and was quickly trapped into prostitution. More taste memories follow her life as a sex worker as well as her happy marriage to a leftist artist, cut short by his death during a protest march. Tastes also represent the five friends central to Leila's life and their individual stories of being mistreated, victimized, and/or made to feel invisible. Sexual abuse, political corruption, and religious fundamentalists' intolerance have been the tropes in so many Shafak novels that her outrage here, however heartfelt, feels shopworn. And her plotting can be overwrought. Yet Shafak's ability to create empathy for her cast of sex workers and social outcasts can be irresistible, especially when a character is allowed more complexity, like Leila's oldest friend, Sinan, who hid his love for Leila until her death. An uneven mix of charm, melodrama, polemics, and cliché that doesn't represent the prolific Shafak at her best.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from October 15, 2019
Leila cannot believe that she's been murdered and dumped in a trash bin on the shadowy edge of Istanbul. Ever-courageous Turkish writer Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve, 2017) creates another resilient woman protagonist at odds with Turkey's repressive society in this Man Booker shortlist title, though, in irrepressible Leila, Shafak raises her literary dissent to a new level. The first half of this seductively imaginative, rambunctiously humorous, complexly tragic, and lyrically redemptive tale presents Leila's tough life in enrapturing and enraging flashbacks as her brain lights up with a final 10-minute-and-38-second surge of memories, from the cruel betrayal of her mother, a tyrannized second wife, to the sexual abuse that finally induces Leila to run away to Istanbul, where she finds some safety and love in a brothel. Leila also remembers her five beloved friends?Sinan, her childhood ally; Nalan, a trans woman; Jameelah, a trafficked Somalian; Zaynab, a dwarf and fortune-teller; and Humeyra, a singer who fled domestic violence. This band of squabbling, traumatized, loyal, witty, and heroic outcasts carry the story forward as they seek Leila's grave in the grim Cemetery of the Companionless. Shafak's motley and compassionate cast embodies both the brutal consequences of tyranny and the power of individuals to undermine it in a full-tilt novel set in a fabled city, a swirling microcosm of human complexity and paradox.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.) -
November 1, 2019
In a novel circling a murdered woman's last moments as she recalls key incidents from her life, Shafak (The Three Daughters of Eve, 2017, etc.) highlights Turkish society's treatment of women and outsiders. Tequila Leila, a middle-aged sex worker, lingers at the border between life and death inside a metal garbage can on the fringes of Istanbul--to which Turkish-born Shafak has written a highly ambivalent love letter; lyrical prose embraces the sensual, sordid, and corrupt city she no longer visits for political reasons. Speaking of sensual, Leila's final minutes are structured around remembered tastes, from the salt on her skin as a newborn to the single malt whiskey sipped with her last customer before recklessly getting into a car with strangers. The flavor of watermelon returns her to a childhood complicated by confusion over her birth mother's identity and irreparably damaged by an uncle's repeated sexual abuse beginning when she was 6 in 1953. In 1963 Leila faced an arranged marriage while mourning her younger brother's death, events associated with goat stew. Instead she ran 1,000 miles away from her hometown to Istanbul and was quickly trapped into prostitution. More taste memories follow her life as a sex worker as well as her happy marriage to a leftist artist, cut short by his death during a protest march. Tastes also represent the five friends central to Leila's life and their individual stories of being mistreated, victimized, and/or made to feel invisible. Sexual abuse, political corruption, and religious fundamentalists' intolerance have been the tropes in so many Shafak novels that her outrage here, however heartfelt, feels shopworn. And her plotting can be overwrought. Yet Shafak's ability to create empathy for her cast of sex workers and social outcasts can be irresistible, especially when a character is allowed more complexity, like Leila's oldest friend, Sinan, who hid his love for Leila until her death. An uneven mix of charm, melodrama, polemics, and clich� that doesn't represent the prolific Shafak at her best.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- The New York Times Book Review Shafak writes with vision, bravery and compassion . . . a stunning portrait of a city, a society, a small community and a single soul.
- The Washington Post A deeply humane story about the cruel effects of Turkey's intolerant sexual attitudes . . . Shafak is a master of captivating moments that provide a sprawling and intimate vision of Istanbul . . . Ultimately, "10 Minutes" isn't really about death, but the persistence of love . . . Leila's ragtag friends, scorned and mocked by polite society, can't possibly triumph over the forces of religious and political corruption, but they - and Shafak - manage to create something truly subversive: a community of devotion beyond the reach of state or mosque.
- Library Journal, starred review A beautifully written tour de force of exemplary storytelling . . . Its powerful insights into Turkey's past and present challenges and the world today make it highly recommended.
- The Guardian Extraordinary . . . a piercing, unflinching look at the trauma women's minds and bodies are subjected to in a social system defined by patriarchal codes.
- starred review, Booklist Ever-courageous Turkish writer Shafak creates another resilient woman protagonist at odds with Turkey's repressive society . . . [A] seductively imaginative, rambunctiously humorous, complexly tragic, and lyrically redemptive tale . . . Shafak's motley and compassionate cast embodies both the brutal consequences of tyranny and the power of individuals to undermine it in a full-tilt novel set in a fabled city, a swirling microcosm of human complexity and paradox.
- NPR's Book Concierge Gripping . . . Through flashbacks to [the protagonist's] life in modern-day Turkey, minute by minute, you'll feel her wonder, her joy, her pain. You'll feel empathy for a girl whose life is upended from the day she is born. It's companionship with other Istanbul transplants that saves Leila from complete despair. And as you get to know Leila's other friends on the margins of society, you find yourself rooting for them in the unlikeliest of endeavors.
- Shelf Awareness Shafak portrays Istanbul in all its glorious chaos against the backdrop of civil unrest that culminated in the Taksim Square Massacre of 1977. Despite being harassed by Turkish authorities for her depiction of sexual violence, the author uses the megaphone of her 12th novel to further expose female exploitation and sexual abuse. In this way she succeeds in giving a voice to the voiceless.
- Publishers Weekly, starred review This is a vividly realized and complicated portrait of a woman making a life for herself in grueling circumstances, and of the labyrinthine city in which she does so.
- The Economist Lyrical and often magical . . . a love-letter to Istanbul.
- Counterpunch A bold step forward by Turkey's most significant woman writer . . . Elif Shafak is enormously gifted.
- The Booker Prize panel Elif Shafak's audacious, dazzlingly original storytelling brings Istanbul's underworld to life via the vivid recollections of sex worker Tequila Leila, recently dumped for dead in a rubbish bin . . . A work of fearless imagination, the story takes the reader into the vertiginous world of its irresistible heroine, whose bloody-minded determination and fierce optimism make her an unforgettable character whose death, albeit foretold, still comes as a shattering blow. Courageous and utterly captivating, this telling novel is a testament to the power of friendship and of the human spirit.
- Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING and REPUTATIONS A heartbreaking meditation on the ways in which social forces can destroy a life. Elif Shafak can be unsparing, lyrical, political, intimate... Several novels live in this one, and all of them are moving, generous and elegantly written.
- Colum McCann, author of LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN Elif Shafak brings into the written realm what so many others want to leave outside. Spend more than ten minutes and 38 seconds in this world of the estranged. Shafak makes a new home for us in words.
- Peter Frankopan, author of THE NEW SILK ROADS Haunting, moving, beautifully written-and based by an extraordinary cast of characters who capture the diversity of modern Turkey. A masterpiece.
- Hanif Kureishi [Elif Shafak is] one of the best writers in the world today.
- Philippe Sands, author of EAST WEST STREET Simply magnificent, a truly captivating work of immense power and beauty, on the essence of life and
