Elif Shafak

'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 …

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Elif Shafak's examination of national identity."You know, I never understand. How come their children are so quiet and well disciplined?""Yeah," said the …

A rich, magical, Sunday Times bestselling novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.*****You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. In 1974, two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided Cyprus, meet at a tavern in the city they both call home. The tavern is …

“She has a particular genius for depicting backstreet Istanbul, where the myriad cultures of the Ottoman Empire are still in tangled evidence on every family tree.”—The New York Times Book ReviewSet within a once-stately apartment block in Istanbul, The Flea Palace tells the story of Bonbon Palace, built by Russian …

*The international bestseller* "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 …

The Saint of Incipient Insanities is the comic and heartbreaking story of a group of twenty-something friends, and their never-ending quest for fulfillment. Omer, Abed and Piyu are roommates, foreigners all recently arrived in the United States. Omer, from Istanbul, is a Ph.D. student in political science who adapts …