Why a Booktrail?
1850s: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, arsenic and secrets galore
In One Brief Moment All Eternity
What you need to know before your trail
In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a luminous reinvention of an iconic male writer, told through the eyes of the women – real and fictional – who shaped him: a devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer and a passionate, jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten. Through their voices, visionary author Elif Shafak creates both an intimate portrait of a great artist and an epic meditation on storytelling itself: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how can literature endure through political upheaval, war and injustice? When the world feels broken, how do we find the hope to carry on?
Travel Guide
From France to Turkey and beyond
Shafak takes readers on an extraordinary journey through time and space, from Flaubert’s unusual childhood in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, and onwards to Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut. In this exhilarating tale, the questions at the heart of her work take on a thrilling new urgency: who gets to speak, and what would the silenced have said?
Gustave Flaubert’s real-life “Grand Tour” of the Levant between 1849 and 1851 directly inspired Elif Shafak’s settings. Travelling alongside his close friend, the writer and photographer Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert recorded his experiences in diaries and letters.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: In One Brief Moment All Eternity
Destination/location: Rouen, Paris Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut Author/Guide: Elif Shafak Departure Time: 1856
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