Elif Shafak Books in Order

If you want a first good introduction: The Bastard of Istanbul → The Forty Rules of Love → 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
If you like family stories shaped by history: Honour → The Island of Missing Trees → There Are Rivers in the Sky
If you want big historical settings: The Architect's Apprentice → The Forty Rules of Love → There Are Rivers in the Sky
If you prefer memoir and essays: Black Milk → The Happiness of Blond People → How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971, to Turkish parents. After her parents separated, she was raised mostly by her mother and grandmother, first in Ankara and later across several cities, including Madrid, Amman, and Cologne. That early life of movement shows up all through her fiction, where borders, memory, and belonging are never abstract ideas, but part of everyday life.

Books were her steady place.

She has spoken about reading Don Quixote as a teenager and realizing that fiction could open whole new rooms in the mind. She went on to study International Relations, then earned a master's degree in Gender and Women's Studies and a PhD in political science. Before writing full time, she taught in Turkey, the United States, and the UK, including at Oxford.

Shafak writes in both Turkish and English, and that doubleness matters. Her early Turkish novels made her name at home, but The Saint of Incipient Insanities, her first novel written in English, introduced English-language readers to her interest in migrants, friendship, and people who feel out of place wherever they go. The Bastard of Istanbul widened that readership again, and also led to a prosecution in Turkey that was later dismissed.

She has never treated storytelling as separate from public life.

Readers often come to her through The Forty Rules of Love, a novel that links a modern woman's midlife reckoning with the story of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Others start with Honour, a family story that moves from Turkey to London and asks what happens when old codes of shame and duty travel with people. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, begins with the murdered Leila in Istanbul and becomes a fierce, tender story about friendship and dignity.

Then there is The Island of Missing Trees, where a forbidden love story on divided Cyprus echoes into the life of a teenage girl in London, with a fig tree acting as witness and memory keeper. Her recent novel There Are Rivers in the Sky stretches even wider, following lives linked by water, loss, and the long afterlife of stories. Across these books, readers tend to find the same pull, big historical questions carried in intimate, very human scenes.

She also writes nonfiction with the same openness. After the birth of her daughter in 2006, she experienced postnatal depression and later wrote about it in Black Milk, a candid book about motherhood, creativity, and the fear of losing yourself inside a new role. In shorter works such as How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division and The Happiness of Blond People, she turns to anxiety, migration, identity, and the need to keep talking across differences.

Istanbul is one of her lasting settings, but so are all the in-between places. She returns again and again to women on the edge of family rules, outsiders building makeshift communities, and people carrying more than one language inside them. Sufism, oral storytelling, history, and city life all run through her work, but never as decoration. They shape the way her characters love, argue, remember, and survive.

Shafak lives in London and continues to write novels, essays, and public talks. In 2024 she received the British Academy President's Medal, and in 2025 she became President of the Royal Society of Literature. The thread through it all is easy to spot. She is interested in how stories can cross walls that politics, fear, and habit keep building.