RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a profound, humanising narrative ... buzzing, chaotic ... Shafak does something remarkable here. She infuses Leila’s personality with heart and soul and surrounds her with a set of \'undesirables\', five friends whose characters are sketched with beauty and pain. By revealing layer upon layer of her interior life, the novel draws a magnificently nuanced portrait of its protagonist ... Shafak takes a piercing, unflinching look at the trauma women’s minds and bodies are subjected to in a social system defined by patriarchal codes. It’s a brutal book, bleak and relentless in its portrayal of violence, heartbreak and grief, but ultimately life-affirming. Here, as in Shafak’s previous work, we find the good old-fashioned art of intricate storytelling, something I miss sometimes in modern fiction. The mad, exhilarating final section, in which Leila is a corpse being driven away from the \'cemetery of the companionless\' by her friends, is a testament to Shafak’s brilliance as a storyteller. People in Turkey and elsewhere should celebrate her work.
