She and her husband socialize with powerful businessmen (some of whom are involved in dodgy deals) and an image-conscious class of women who “paraded their handbags like trophies won in faraway battles.” When caught in traffic Peri puts her own handbag in the backseat where it's stolen by a thief. It's been over fifteen years since she studied at Oxford and the life she's settled into is very different from her idealistic university years in England. The novel opens on a typical day in 2016 when Peri is living as a mother in Istanbul driving with her daughter to a high-class dinner party.
Shafak creates a deeply meaningful, extremely relevant and riveting tale about the role belief plays in these modern women's lives. These three women are referred to as “the Sinner, the Believer, the Confused.” They are individuals caught in a state of flux between different nations, faiths and ideologies. Enrolled in this seminar alongside her are friends Shirin, a bisexual woman with an Iranian background who considers herself “as British as a treacle tart but as out of place as a stuffed date cake” and Mona, a politically-engaged woman of Egyptian descent who is an ardently devout Muslim. However, at the centre of this story is Peri, a highly intelligent Turkish woman who is confused about what God means to her. Every term he holds a selective seminar whose sole purpose is to probe the philosophical meaning of God. Religion continues to be at the centre of many battles, yet in her new novel Elif Shafak creates the character of A.Z.Azur, a controversial Oxford professor who encourages dialogue across religious belief systems as he believes that too many people suffer from what he calls “The Malady of Certainty”. When different factions are so convinced about the certitude of their own ideas and beliefs conflict is inevitable. It's deeply frightening and upsetting how politically divided society is at the moment.
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