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  • Published: 7 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966266
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 252

Black Milk

On Motherhood and Writing




An affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female author

Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and - like most of its victims- Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them.

But after the birth of her first child in 2006, the internationally bestselling Turkish author remembers how, "for the first time my adult life... words wouldn't speak to me".

As her despair finally eased, Shafak sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own experiences.

In her intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed.

  • Published: 7 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966266
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 252

About the author

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into fifty-five languages. The author of nineteen books, twelve of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak's latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was a top ten Sunday Times bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women's Prize. Her previous novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell's Book of the Year. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to 'the renewal of the art of storytelling.'

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Praise for Black Milk

Black Milk is a book to dip into, to lend around, a book that you feel deserves to be read by all women attempting to draw together so many differing aspirations. . . It's a book to be readily passed on to. . . all those with a taste for humour and imagination - to anyone who happens to be wondering what women on either side of European frontier might possibly have in common

Le Magazine Azur

Shafak has given us a storyteller's most poignant offering: a metaphorical amplifier for listening to the stories within ourselves

Ms. Magazine

An intimate, affecting memoir . . . Her passion for literature is contagious, and her struggle with postpartum depression and writer's block reinforces how carefully all of us must tread. Beautifully rendered, Shafak's Black Milk is an epic poem to women everywhere

Colleen Mondor