Three Daughters of Eve

“It was an ordinary spring day in Istanbul, a long and leaden afternoon like so many others, when she discovered, with a hollowness in her stomach, that she was capable of killing someone.”

Can an attempted robbery and assault force your entire life to flash before your eyes? Can a Polaroid plunge you back into the year that shaped everything — your beliefs, your mistakes, your identity? In Three Daughters of Eve, the answer is a desperate, aching yes.

Elif Shafak needs no introduction, and in this novel, she weaves a tale made of a thousand vivid, interwoven threads. Set between Istanbul and Oxford, this is Peri’s story — a story about faith and doubt, love and loneliness, and what it means to hurt others, to be human, to seek happiness. Touching on the cruelty of the Ottoman past, brushed with an elegant note of Magical Realism, Peri narrates her very soul to us. Troubled, intelligent Peri. A true bookworm, caught between a nihilist father and a fundamentalist mother, with books as her only solace. A reader of people. A confused idealist. A quiet young woman who goes about her life troubling no one, longing to be left alone — a lover of hushed debates, having found her haven in Oxford.

Until love strikes. That elemental force before which we are all defenceless.

Through the beautiful character of Peri — can you tell I adored her? — we’re given the chance to view Istanbul and Oxford side by side, like an intricate lecture on Descartes (and yes, I loved that scene…). Turkey, as Shafak presents it, is a country trying to balance between two boats — East and West — and failing to remain steady in either. Her elegant, often wry political and social commentary sketches a chaotic city bowed under the weight of a chaotic culture.

‘We’ are the Christians. The Westerners. ‘They’ are the pious Muslims. Turkey, in this novel, appears as a lighter version of an Islamic State: a place devoid of respect for women, children, Christians, basic human rights — full of hostility, and yet curiously submissive toward the very tyrants it creates. A country clinging to both inferiority and superiority complexes, stranded in cultural limbo.

Oxford, by contrast, is confidence. Its culture is steeped in a past it has claimed and understood. Istanbul’s past is stained with blood, massacres, and inherited barbarity. And Shafak, to her credit, doesn’t shy away from making that point utterly, unflinchingly clear.

‘’It’s hard to break our chains when some of us love being shackled.’’

Peri embodies the quiet, persistent resistance of a woman in a country that punishes femininity with cruelty and control. She walks through Istanbul—the city of rapes—where life bends to men’s convenience. A place where husbands demand virginity tests, where women devour each other over dinner tables dressed as social gatherings. Turkey, with all its contradictions, has no place in Europe—not in this state. And yet, in this brutal landscape, Peri remains tender. Her first love, wild and devastating, offers a glimmer of salvation. In love, we are all defenceless, all innocent.

Mona, with her pious self-righteousness, is a brute dressed in liberal fabric. Shirin, an oversexualized caricature, is an exhausting echo of Western clichés. Neither holds a candle to Peri’s inner light. I almost wish they had never intruded upon the pages of such a soulful novel. And Azure—mysterious, magnetic, brilliant—who wouldn’t fall for him?

‘’Now I can see it clearly. When we fall in love, we turn the other person into our god - How dangerous is that? And when he doesn't love us back, we respond with anger, resentment, hatred. There’s something about love that resembles faith. It's a kind of blind trust, isn't it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love-or by faith-it turns into a dogma,a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of the gods that we ourselves created.’’

Then Faith enters the game. The women who impose such tyranny on themselves, brainwashed by a twisted piety, faithful to an unapproachable God. How lucky we are to be Christian, because we doubt and believe. We erase and create. Not egoistic believers, but true seekers. That is who Peri is. Not someone who seeks psychics, but one who speaks directly to her God.

Through Safak, we witness attitudes that estrange women from their sacred places. Jesus elevated Woman; fundamentalist Muslims hate her very existence. Azur’s sharp debates on God expose atheists and fundamentalists as two sides of the same coin. Our faith is what keeps us from collapsing; it shelters us from absolute despair. We see God as Love when we love ourselves. Imagine how atheists and fundamentalists view themselves… And this is why, eventually, your downfall comes when you think you have what it takes to ‘decode’ God.

Three Daughters of Eve is one of those rare novels that stays with you long after you close the cover. It seeps into your mind and refuses to leave, leaving behind a swirl of anger, heartbreak, and awe. Elif Shafak doesn’t hand you easy answers or tidy endings. Instead, she drags you into the raw, tangled mess of faith, love, identity — and the cost they demand.

I can’t deny my frustration with Peri’s choices — how love blinded her, how she gave up so much, how she stumbled toward pain. And yet, I found pieces of myself in her — in her doubts, her fierce intelligence, her longing for something more. That flawed, messy humanity makes her unforgettable. This is a story that haunts you, challenges you, tears down what you thought you knew about belief and freedom, and forces you to face uncomfortable truths.

If I write best when I’m furious, then Three Daughters of Eve lit a fire inside me that won’t burn out. Reading it felt like staring into a mirror cracked by love and faith and loss. Even now, my thoughts keep returning to Peri — to the woman I admired, the woman I wanted to save, and the woman who was herself, no matter what.

And even as I struggle to find words worthy of its weight, this much is clear: this is a book to be felt with every fiber of your being, to be wrestled with long after the last page.

‘’She had taken her God - diary with her, into which she now wrote: The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me, Eckhart says. If I approach God with rigidity, Gold approaches me with rigidity. If I see God through love, God sees me through Love. My eye and God’s eye are One.’’

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