MUST READS
10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World by Elif Shafak (Penguin £8.99, 320 pp)
10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World
by Elif Shafak (Penguin £8.99, 320 pp)
Elif Shafak’s Booker-shortlisted novel begins with an ending. Tequila Leila finds herself inside a wheelie bin on the outskirts of Istanbul.
‘She realised with a sinking feeling that, whichever way she looked at her situation, there was no denying that she was dead.’
Dead she may be, but her consciousness survives, and for the brief timespan of the title, her mind ranges over the events of her life, which will be summed up in a headline on the TV evening news: ‘Prostitute found slain in city waste bin.’
Shafak’s novel chronicles the spirit — downtrodden, debased, but irrepressible — of Leila, her eccentric group of friends and Istanbul, the brutal, beautiful city that offers them both persecution and refuge.
The Memory Police
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Vintage £8.99, 288 pp)
by Yoko Ogawa (Vintage £8.99, 288 pp)
‘I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first — among all the things that have vanished from the island,’ reflects the narrator. As a child, she would sit in the riverside studio belonging to her mother, a sculptor, examining objects that no longer existed: a bell, a ribbon, a perfume bottle. Yet she has no memory of them, and she will learn that to remember can be fatal.
No one knows who decides what is to be deleted, but the absences are enforced with increasing violence by blank-eyed Memory Police.
The narrator joins forces with an old friend to protect her editor, R, whose memory is dangerously intact.
Ogawa’s elegant, haunting novel comes with an urgent message: ‘Important things remain important, no matter how much the world changes.’
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (Vintage £9.99, 416 pp)
Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie (Vintage £9.99, 416 pp)
Ismail Smile, ‘a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers’, is a former sales executive who has become addicted to trash television.
In particular, he has fallen for a daytime talk show presenter, Miss Salma R.
Elderly and low on funds, he nevertheless decides to pay court to his beloved under a pseudonym taken from his favourite piece of childhood music: Massenet’s opera, Don Quichotte.
Rushdie’s reimagining of an elderly lover’s romantic journey is a whirlwind road trip through Trump’s America.
The novel’s dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope.