Meeting on a warm summer’s morning in her adopted city of London, Turkish writer Elif Shafak reaches out with a genuine smile that promises to apportion intimacy in degrees. Though she has a Twitter following of 1.7 million, she describes herself as an introvert.
Her latest novel, The Three Daughters of Eve, explores the relationship with Islam of three female students at the University of Oxford: the ‘believer’, who is ‘at home’ with her religion and ‘at peace’ with who she is; the ‘sinner’, who compares dogma and higher authority to garlic, ‘the more you use it, the heavier the smell’; and the ‘confused’, whose God is ‘a maze without a map’.
