In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Shafak Elif [Paperback]

Elif Shafak reimagines the life and literary legacy of Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist who created Madame Bovary, through the perspectives of women whose voices and experiences have been overlooked by history. Blending real and fictional women, the novel explores Flaubert’s relationships, his artistic world, and the silencing of women within literature and society. Moving across nineteenth-century France and places including Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut, it examines how storytelling shapes historical memory, whose experiences deserve to be heard, and how literature preserves hope amid political upheaval, war, injustice and human suffering.