The Book That Changed Everything

From the reading: The Book That Changed Everything

In 1986, Elif Shafak was eleven years old and living in Ankara when she found a novel hidden behind a loose tile in her grandmother's kitchen. The book had no cover. Someone had removed it deliberately. She did not know the author's name, and she could not ask — because asking would have meant admitting she had been somewhere she should not have been. She read it in secret, in three nights, and when she finished she felt, for the first time, that fiction could carry more truth than any newspaper she had ever read.