THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

* One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World'*

"Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough . . ."

Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.

It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into an exotic world where faith and love are heartbreakingly explored. . .

'Enlightening, enthralling. An affecting paean to faith and love' Metro

'Colourfully woven and beguilingly intelligent' Daily Telegraph

'The past and present fit together beautifully in a passionate defence of passion itself' The Times

One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life.

Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.

'Wonderfully magical, incredible, breathtaking...will have you gasping with disbelief in the last few pages' Sunday Express

'A beautiful book, the finest I have read about Turkey' Irish Times

'Heartbreaking...the beauty of Islam pervades Shafak's book' Vogue

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019

'Expect vibrant, vivid and eye-opening descriptions of Middle Eastern life propelled by a tender storyline, all in Shafak's haunting, beautiful and considered prose' Vanity Fair

'Incredibly sensuous and poetic and evocative' Pandora Sykes, The High Low

'Richly uplifting... truly beautiful writing' Nicola Sturgeon

'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore...'

For Leila, each minute after her death recalls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women's legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each fading memory brings back the friends she made in her bittersweet life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her . . .

'Simply magnificent, a truly captivating work of immense power and beauty, on the essence of life and its end' Philippe Sands

'A vivid carnival of life and death, cruelty and kindness, love, politics and deep humanity. Brilliant!' Helena Kennedy

'Elif Shafak brings into the written realm what so many others want to leave outside. Spend more than ten minutes and 38 seconds in this world of the estranged. Shafak makes a new home for us in words' Colum McCann

'Elif Shafak's extraordinary 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World is a work of brutal beauty and consummate tenderness' Simon Schama

'A rich, sensual novel... This is a novel that gives voice to the invisible, the untouchable, the abused and the damaged, weaving their painful songs into a thing of beauty.' Financial Times

'One of the best writers in the world today' Hanif Kureishi

'Haunting, moving, beautifully written - and based by an extraordinary cast of characters who capture the diversity of modern Turkey. A masterpiece' Peter Frankopan

'Extraordinary' Guardian

'Life-affirming' Stylist

A dazzling and intricate tale from Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

'There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together...'

Sixteenth century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the Sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no worldly possessions to his name except Chota, a rare white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.

So begins an epic adventure that will see young Jahan rise from lowly origins to the highest ranks of the Sultan's court. Along the way he will meet deceitful courtiers and false friends, gypsies, animal tamers, and the beautiful, mischievous Princess Mihrimah. He will journey on Chota's back to the furthest corners of the Sultan's kingdom and back again. And one day he will catch the eye of the royal architect, Sinan, a chance encounter destined to change Jahan's fortunes forever.

Filled with all the colour of the Ottoman Empire, when Istanbul was the teeming centre of civilisation, The Architect's Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant caught up in a world of wonder and danger.

'A gorgeous picture of a city teeming with secrets, intrigue and romance' The Times

'Shafak's most ambitious novel yet her best - generous and imaginative' Independent

'Exuberant, epic and comic, fantastical and realistic . . . like all good stories it conveys deeper meanings about human experience' Financial Times

'Fascinating. A vigorous evocation of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power' Sunday Times

'Intricate, multi-layered, resplendent, vividly evoked, beautifully written' Observer

'Sumptuous, absorbing, moving' Independent on Sunday

*As mentioned on BBC's Desert Island Discs*

'A fascinating exploration of faith and friendship, rich and poor, and the devastating clash of tradition and modernity' Independent

Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal.

Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past - and a love - Peri had tried desperately to forget.

The photograph takes Peri back to Oxford University, as an eighteen year old sent abroad for the first time. To her dazzling, rebellious Professor and his life-changing course on God. To her home with her two best friends, Shirin and Mona, and their arguments about Islam and femininity. And finally, to the scandal that tore them all apart.

'Elegant ... calm and generous' Mary Beard, Guardian

The must-read, pocket-sized Big Think book of 2020

One of the Guardian's 'Best Books to Inspire Compassion'
One of Independent's Books of the Month
A Cosmopolitan 'Revolutionary Read'

Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. We feel overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, by an endless feeling of crisis. So, how can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? And how can we stay sane in this age of division?

In this powerful, uplifting plea for conscious optimism, Booker Prize-nominated novelist and activist Elif Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to bring us together. In the process, she reveals how listening to each other can nurture democracy, empathy and our faith in a kinder and wiser future.

From Booker-shortlisted author Elif Shafak, Honour is a gripping tale of love, betrayal and clashing cultures.

'My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten'

Pembe and Adem Toprak leave Turkey for London. There they make new lives for their family. Yet the traditions and beliefs of their home come with them - carried in the blood of their children, Iskender and Esma. Trapped by past mistakes, the Toprak children find their lives torn apart and transformed by a brutal and chilling crime.

Set in Turkey and London in the 1970s, Honour explores pain and loss, loyalty and betrayal, the clash of tradition and modernity, as well as the love and heartbreak that can tear any family apart.

'One of the best writers in the world today' Hanif Kureishi

'Vivid storytelling... that explores the darkest aspects of faith and love' Sunday Telegraph

Black Milk is the affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female writer Elif Shafak, author of Honour, The Gaze and The Bastard of Istanbul which was long-listed for the Orange prize.

Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and- like most of its victims- Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them.

But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how "for the first time my adult life . . . words wouldn't speak to me".

As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences.

In her intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed.

'An intimate, affecting memoir . . . Her passion for literature is contagious, and her struggle with postpartum depression and writer's block reinforces how carefully all of us must tread. Beautifully rendered, Shafak's Black Milk is an epic poem to women everywhere' Colleen Mondor

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

By turns comic and tragic, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the garbage at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

"An enchanting combination of compassion and cruelty . . . Elif Shafak is the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade" - Orhan Pamuk

"Hyper-active and hilarious" - Independent

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

The Happiness of Blond People by bestselling, multi-award-winning novelist Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul, is a powerful essay on immigration, multiculturalism and the experience of Muslims in Europe - available only as a Penguin Short.

"You know, I never understand. How come their children are so quiet and well disciplined?"
"Yeah," said the distressed father, his voice suddenly softer. "Blond children never cry, do they?"

As Elif Shafak stands in line at the airport, she overhears a Turkish father expressing to a friend his bewilderment at the cultural differences he's experienced since immigrating to northern Europe. Is it true, she wonders, that the citizens of these countries are genuinely happier? Why do people leave their homes for other countries? And what lessons can we all learn, for the creation of truly harmonious societies, from the experiences of immigrants?

In the light of the recent backlash against multiculturalism and the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe from the east, this powerful and personal essay uses the lived experience of immigrants to examine this most hotly debated subject.

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of the award-winning The Gaze and The Bastard of Istanbul and is the foremost female author in Turkey. She is a contributor for the Telegraph, Guardian and The New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received over 300,000 views since July 2010. She is the recipient of nine prestigious international honours and awards including the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, long-listing for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Maria Grazia Cutuli Award. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and the UK.

A beautiful and compelling novel, Elif Shafak's The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others

"I didn't say anything. I didn't return his smiles. I looked at him in the wide mirror in front of where I was sitting. He grew uncomfortable and avoided my eyes. I hate those who think fat people are stupid.'

An obese woman and her lover, a dwarf, are sick of being stared at wherever they go, and so decide to reverse roles. The man goes out wearing make up and the woman draws a moustache on her face. But while the woman wants to hide away from the world, the man meets the stares from passers-by head on, compiling his 'Dictionary of Gazes' to explore the boundaries between appearance and reality.

Intertwined with the story of a bizarre freak-show organised in Istanbul in the 1880s, The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others.

"Beautifully evoked" - The Times

"Original and Compelling" - TLS

"Plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness like they're Rubik's cubes" - Helen Oyeyemi

"Entertaining and affecting" - Publishers' Weekly

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

Meet the people of Cairo’s Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there.

This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old papers. Found with a slip of paper titled ‘for publishing 1994’, they are published here for the first time. Resplendent with Mahfouz’s delicate and poignant observations of everyday happenings, these lively stories take the reader deep into the beating heart of Cairo.