Agonised questions
It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who