The Booker-shortlisted novelist is in self-imposed exile from Turkey, where she fears arrest. But here in Britain, she likes food that brings back memories of Istanbul
Elif Shafak’s most recent novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange Worldis built around the dying thoughts of Leila, a sex worker, in the time after her heart has stopped beating but her sensory memory remains. Each chapter begins with a taste – sugar, lemon, cardamom coffee, watermelon, spiced goat stew – that takes Leila back to a formative moment in her life, and begins to explain the brutal way in which it is ending. Taken together these memories conjure a city, Istanbul, in all of its contrasting flavours.
The novel – included on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize– displays all of its author’s lyrical gifts for storytelling, but you guess that the memory device was also born out of an urgent personal necessity: for the past three years Shafak has been unable to return to the country in which she grew up for fear of arrest and prosecution.
In a conservative environment, celebrating pleasure is a radical act
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