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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the novelist and campaigner and teacher and public speaker Elif Schaffak,

whose latest book, longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, is 10 minutes and 38 seconds in this

strange world. Alif, welcome. Thank you. Tell us a bit about this book. It's got a very unusual

premise. Its heroine is dead at the beginning. Right, at the very beginning. Actually, the first

two words in this novel are the end. That's how it begins. So right away, we know that the main character is dead. She's a sex worker. Her name is Leila in Istanbul. She has been brutally killed and her body has been dumped in a garbage bin. But the thing is, I became very interested in these studies,

scientific and medical studies that show after the moment of death, after the heart has stopped

beating, the brain can remain active for another few minutes. So that to me was an amazing puzzle.

Particularly in Canada, doctors have found out, and researchers have observed persistent brain activity for about 10 minutes in dead patients.

So when I started writing this story, I remembered that, I researched that. And therefore, we do know right away that Leila is dead, but her brain is still working.

And as she remembers her past, minute by minute by minute, we travel into her story, but also

the story of Turkey, the story of the Middle East, a little bit, always told through the eyes

of outcasts.

People have been pushed to the

periphery. I was going to say also 10 minutes. You added 38 seconds yourself. Why did you choose

38 seconds? Yeah, I wanted to add another 38 seconds. It was so challenging, but at the same time,

inspiring for a novelist to take the idea which gave me

the structure of the book because every chapter you know you have one minute to tell something

...