In One Brief Moment All Eternity

Across nineteenth-century France, Ottoman Istanbul, Egypt and Beirut, Elif Shafak reimagines the life and creative world of Gustave Flaubert through women usually left at the margins of his biography. A devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer, a mistress, a corpse and fictional women created by his pen speak from positions that conventional literary history has denied them.

Flaubert’s struggle to write during censorship, political upheaval and war is set against the independent memories of those he observed, desired or transformed into material. Emma Bovary becomes more than the possession of her creator, while Eastern and Western storytelling traditions challenge one another across the novel. The book asks who is remembered, who is erased and what imaginative work can preserve when public life is fractured by violence.