Three Daughters of Eve

Peri, a well-off Turkish housewife, is caught in Istanbul traffic on her way to a dinner party when a beggar snatches her handbag. The mugging, and the attempted assault that follows, jolts loose an old photograph — and with it, memories of Oxford, where as a young woman she studied under a brilliant, controversial professor and befriended two very different Muslim women.

Elif Shafak braids the present-day dinner, with its politically fractious guests, together with Peri's Istanbul childhood between a secular father and a devout mother, and her transformative, scandalous years at university. There she fell under the spell of Professor Azur, whose provocative seminar on the idea of God drew a small circle of students, and formed an intense triangle with Shirin, the defiant Iranian "Sinner," and Mona, the devout Egyptian-American "Believer" — leaving Peri, forever, the "Confused."

Three Daughters of Eve is a thoughtful, wide-ranging novel about faith and doubt, belonging and identity, and a woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile the God she cannot quite believe in with the one she cannot quite abandon.