10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
ELIF SHAFAK
(AUDIBLE, £19.24)
The device used to frame this Booker- shortlisted novel is brilliantly original and brilliantly simple. Leila, an Istanbul sex worker, has been killed and dumped in a bin. As she dies, she remembers key moments in her past: birth, childhood, rebellion from her father, flight to Istanbul, her brief, blissful marriage and her friendship with the five people who, when her body is finally dead, take up its story.
Leila’s murderers are men who hate women, and from the beginning her life is blighted by the injustices women suffer. Gentle, illiterate “auntie”, her father’s youngest wife, is Leila’s real mother. Forced by her husband to hand over her new baby to the older, childless wife, Auntie’s unspoken suffering fills the household. Power is firmly in the hands of Leila’s father. He becomes more repressive as his religiosity grows. Family reputation is defended as fiercely as religious tradition. When Leila produces incontrovertible evidence of abuse on her uncle’s part, her father defends his brother instead of protecting his daughter. She runs away and he forbids her to come back or make contact; she has brought shame on the family.
