Elif Shafak's bio is quite mind blowing. She has written 17 novels, in English and Turkish, which have been translated into fifty languages. Holds a PhD in Political Science and has taught in many Universities including Oxford. I have read two of her books.
This one starts with a death - a murder. Tequila Leila is found in a dumpster and Shafak takes us through Leila's life in the 10 minutes 38 seconds that her soul is still in her body. Born in a conservative Turkish family to a strict father who has a barren first wife, marries again for children, and gives away the first born from the new wife, Leila, to his first wife and tells everyone to pretend that the actual mother is the aunt etc. The real mother of Leila gets upset, has another child, a boy, a Mongoloid. Meanwhile Leila finds herself being abused and finally raped by her father's brother, gets pregnant, confronts her father who tries to hide the affair, and runs away to Istanbul where she finally joins Bitter Ma, who runs a brothel.
Leila finds five friends with names like Sabotage Sinan (the only boy in the bunch), Nostalgia Nalan (a trans), Jameelah (a Somalian), Zaynab122 (a woman with stunted growth) and Hollywood Humeyra (a musician). All of them with different skills, from different backgrounds, countries, sexualities, genders, become friends. Shafak tells Leila's story interspersed with her friends' stories, the events that lead to her death, and then once Leila is dead and buried in a cemetery for the companionless, the five friends embark on a filmi adventure to exhume her body and give it the send off she desired - to be buried at sea.
Easy read. Good insight into Turkey and what it went through and goes through. However the murders of the women, why they were murdered and what happens to the murderers is left open with a mere conversation with the killers about blood on their steering wheel.
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