Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Gaze | 1999 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 2 | The Flea Palace | 2002 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 3 | The Saint of Incipient Insanities | 2004 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 4 | The Bastard of Istanbul | 2006 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 5 | The Forty Rules of Love | 2009 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 6 | Honour | 2012 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 7 | The Architect’s Apprentice | 2013 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 8 | Three Daughters of Eve | 2016 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 9 | 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World | 2019 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 10 | The Island of Missing Trees | 2021 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
| 11 | There Are Rivers in the Sky | 2024 | Elif Shafak | Buy |
Elif Shafak’s eleven standalone novels span from The Gaze (1999) to There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024). The books range across time periods and settings, from a sixteenth-century Ottoman architect’s apprenticeship to a contemporary Oxford dinner party, but they share Shafak’s interest in characters who exist between cultures, languages, and identities.
Her most acclaimed novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, which follows Turkish and Armenian families whose histories are intertwined by the events of 1915, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Island of Missing Trees (2021) tells a love story across the divided island of Cyprus. Each novel works independently, but together they form a body of work concerned with memory, displacement, and the stories people tell to make sense of where they come from.