A luminous novel of the life of Gustave Flaubert, the iconic author of Madame Bovary, told through the eyes of the women—real and fictional—who shaped him, from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author
“I read this beautiful, polyphonic, learned, deeply absorbing book in a trance of pleasure. I closed the novel with a feeling of gratitude for the abiding power of literature and its transformative magic.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of What I Loved
Elif Shafak’s novel opens on the brink of a murder, and the legendary French novelist Gustave Flaubert holds the weapon: his pen, with which he is about to craft the climactic scene of his seminal work, Madame Bovary. As Flaubert tries to bring himself to kill off Emma, the heroine he has spent years imagining, pictures of her swallowing arsenic dance horrifyingly across his field of vision.
And then something miraculous happens—Emma speaks back. She does not want this fate.
Thus begins one of the most dazzling novels of Shafak’s beloved oeuvre, a book that turns the life of Flaubert inside out and allows the many women in it, long relegated to the wings of literary history, to speak at last. In alternating chapters, we follow young Flaubert and his life’s feminine voices, from the maid who first sparked his vibrant imagination by teaching him folklore to the secret lover who haunted the Flaubert family, on to garrulous cooks, carnival women, tutors, and more—some fleeting presences, others more long-term, like the novelist George Sand, and Kuchuk Hanem, the famous courtesan and dancer Flaubert encounters in Egypt—all of them indelibly shaping a mind living on eternally through his literature.
Scheherazade-like, Shafak accompanies readers on a tumble through time and space, starting from when Flaubert was a peculiar child raised by a doctor in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, to Istanbul, Egypt, and Beirut. Shafak has given us a triumphant new tale, a fictional investigation of history, in which the questions at the heart of her work take on a thrilling new urgency: Who gets to speak, and what would the silenced have said?
